Plan to Avoid Failure Modes

Failure modes happen over time, and are often hard to design to avoid. Electronic components have a wide range of failure modes. These can be classified in various ways, such as by time or cause. Failures can be caused by excessive temperature, excessive current or voltage, ionizing radiation, mechanical shock, stress impact, and many other causes. Failures most commonly appear near the beginning or near the end of the components life-cycle. Applications such as aerospace systems, life support systems, telecommunications, railway signals, and computers use great number of electronic components. Analysis of the statistical properties of failure can give proper guidance in designs to establish a certain level a reliability. A list of failure modes is displayed below:

· Contact Failure

· Printed Circuit Board Failure

· Relay Failure

· Semiconductor Failure

· Passive Element Failure

· MEMS Failures

What ever environment that your product will be in, thorough research is needed to proper design the product to withstand the surrounding environment. Last thing you would want is you forgot to incorporate that the ambient temperature could reach up to 300 Fahrenheit (Exaggerated) and your electronic was designed to handle room temperature.

Input Voltage Caused Massive Overheating

Electrical Equipment Safety

No matter all the precaution people take around electricity, it only takes that one moment when a simple mistake could turn into a life threatening situation. Developing new products takes a great deal of time simply designing it to customer specifications. But, it is an unavoidable truth that safety is still the number one unannounced customer requirement. Those who will build it, those who will handle it, those who its designed to be used for, and those who were never supposed to touch it.

Either way you look at it, the risk of electrical shock is still present with every electronic device today. The only thing that we can do is take preventive measures and minimize the chance of someone receiving an electric shock. Has all the components met all standards and guidelines? Has it met the necessary guideline for the industry that it is going to be used in? Last thing you want is for a new baby monitor to have an exposed section of wire. But, realistically this product for this reason would probably not make it to market. Have all measures been taken that you feel everything you have possibly done to prevent any harm or damage from your device been taken?

Safety is the number one unspoken requirement that all electronic devices need to meet. Once this goal is met you can rest peacefully at night that your product won’t harm anyone.

Rethinking the Electrical Design Process

No matter how little or how much experience someone has as an electrical designer, it is always good to take a high-level view of the work that is done. Some of the topics discussed here may seem like, “Yeah this is common sense”, but sometimes its nice to remind ourselves that this is the job, and the electrical design process maybe a method that is often neglected, or in some cases never used. People become their work, and understand everything that goes on around them. Very little change may happen and it is often nice to look at things from a fresh perspective. Electrical designers just need to sit down and remember what it was like when they first started, in order to avoid the big oops at work that any rookie on the job could of told you.