Over the last decade, a new efficient way of improving the robustness of an electronic product has been developed: Highly Accelerated Lifetime Testing (HALT). With HALT, one will stress the product far beyond its operational specifications in order to quickly find and fix the weakest points in the design. As such, HALT stimulates failures in contrast to conventional, accelerated environmental tests which are pass/fail tests that try to simulate the normal, expected environment that the product will encounter (design verification tests). As such, HALT allows to drastically increase the operational margins of the product and, hence, the over-all reliability of the product. In this presentation we will give an overview of how a typical HALT tests is done as well as the main do’s and don’ts.

Presented by: Davy Pissoort (KU Leuven)