Home Products PCB Design Software & Tools Blog The cost of reliability - Just ask Toyota

The cost of reliability - Just ask Toyota

Posted Mar 9, 2010, by John Isaac

Tags: HALT, HyperLynx, Expedition Enterrpise, Reliability, Thermal Analysis, Mechanical Analysis, PCB Design

In the automotive industry we have always talked about the cost of reliability in terms of the warantee expense that they incur when they have a problem. You can justify a lot of tool and designer expense based on the cost of one failure that requires a warantee fix. Turns out warantee costs are a drop in the bucket compared to the cost in sales and credibility being experienced by Toyota.

At Mentor we have been developing and acquiring technology that will help our customers avoid reliability problems.

Our acquisition of Flomerics enables companies to perform full product enclosure thermal analysis and manage the heat generated by today’s high performance ICs. Our HyperLynx power integrity product can predict power distribution network current density issues that can delaminate PCBs over time. We have software technology that performs “Highly Accelerated Lifetime Testing” (HALT) to predict long term PCB vibration failures. Valor will bring manufacturing floor software that gathers data from quality assurance and identifies assembly machine problems.

Preparing Recommendations

So just enabling designers to get a competitive product out the door faster with advanced PCB technology is not enough. Reliability is of increasing importance and the burden is once again falling on the PCB and mechanical designers. Just when we get the answers, they change the questions!

About John Isaac

Biography: More than 40 years experience in design software. Seventeen years with IBM developing and managing the development of design systems. Joined Mentor Graphics in 1984. Expertise: High level knowledge of all aspects of systems design. Understanding of industry and technology trends, and, company's basic business drivers and how they relate to product developement capabilities. Visit John Isaac's Blog

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2 Comments on this Post

Commented on 12:44 PM, Mar 29, 2010
By yanfeng yu

Sofware for PWB's HALT sounds great!Maryland CALCE have annouced concept more ten years ago, Does anyone use it? DfR(Maryland CALCE Staff founded)also annouced they will release same tool for PWB's HALT.I guess Mentor's HALT technology is's the same. I don't think it can bring real value to engineering. Yanfeng

Commented on 10:06 PM, Apr 5, 2010
By John Isaac

Mr. Yu. So good to hear from you again. It has been 2-3 years since we last met at one of our seminars in China. HALT is a technology that we acquired from an Israeli company. They have a some select customers who have been using it successfully. Among those customers is the Tank Development Authority at the Israeli Ministry of Defense who have used it on 5 PCB designs that will go in the next generation Israeli armed vehicle. You can imagine that they are desinging for a very vibration intensive environment. One of the keys to the use of this technology is the ability to easily generate accurate full 3D models of the components including leads which are the cause of many failures upon vibration. So you need both the analysis software and the 3D component generation to make it useable by a reliability engineer.

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The cost of reliability - Just ask Toyota