Are the Today’s Practices for Reliability Assurance of Aerospace Electronic and Photonic Products (AEPP) Adequate?

Dear Colleagues,

Despite all efforts to date, the current aerospace electronic and photonic products (AEPP) that have undergone highly accelerated life testing (HALT), passed qualification tests (QT) and survived burn-in testing (BIT), often still fail in the field. Are the existing reliability assurance practices for AEPP adequate? If not, what could be done differently so that the failure-free performance of a product is assured in the field? Could methods of probabilistic risk analyses be effectively used to offer a reliability rate? On the other hand, the highly popular and widely used HALT, if successful, is supposed to create significant (although unspecified) safety margins. Could these parameters result in an over-engineered product whose cost is considerably higher? Could a well substantiated reduction in the superfluously high reliability of an over-engineered product, or some of its parts, be translated into a lower cost and shorter time-to-market? The reliability cannot be too low, nor does it have to be higher than necessary, but should be adequate for a particular application. To address these questions, one has to be able to quantify reliability. This is particularly important in AEPPs, where high reliability is imperative; the performance of many vital non-electronic-and-photonic products and systems is strongly dependent on the reliability of their electronic and photonic materials. Furthermore, the roles of accelerated testing, design-for-reliability efforts, and the prognostics and health monitoring activity must be considered. All these critical questions will be addressed in this Special Issue of our journal, Aerospace. Therefore, we look forward to hearing of your suggestions for a paper via the submission system at susy.mdpi.com or an email to [email protected].

Prof. Dr. Ephraim Suhir
Guest Editor

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• electronic products
• photonic products
• aepp
• highly accelerated life testing (halt)
• passed qualification tests (qt)
• survived burn-in testing (bit)