A virtual predictive environment for monitoring reliability, life time, and maintainability of printed circuit boards

This thesis highlights the development of an immerse and high fidelity virtual environment for lifetime and reliability analysis of circuit cards for nuclear power electronics. The developed virtual environment allows prediction of total life time, overall reliability and maintainability for circuit cards (system level) and their components (component level) through a simulation methodology. Component repair or replace approaches are used within this simulation which gives the user the ability to choose between them based on experience and component history. As excessive temperature is the primary cause of poor reliability in electronics, quantitative accelerated life tests are designed to quantify the life of circuit cards under different thermal stresses to produce the data required for accelerated life data analysis. This research provides a better understanding and helps in predicting overall system failure characteristics for any given configuration. It allows the user to identify components which contribute the most to downtime and to determine the effect of design alternatives on system performance in a cost-effective manner.