Concept of smart integrated life consumption monitoring system for electronics

Abstract In situ diagnostics or prognostics of electronics are based on environment monitoring and reliability computation associated to experienced loads. As health assessment is a major concern for improving the maintenance process, it has to be known as soon as possible to be able to react according to the health status prediction. Indeed, the speed needed for failure prediction calculation from the stress monitored to the warning reported is essential to prevent ongoing operation of an electronic system on the way to failure. Real time on-board calculation is then the main objective in order to avoid regular data downloads and ground-based analysis. This paper presents a smart and integrated micro-programmable life consumption monitoring system (LCMS). The latter embeds sensors and on-board processing capabilities for advanced prognostics of printed wired assemblies (PWAs). Based on a methodology using physics of failure (PoF), it can provide, in real time, the life consumption prediction of electronics. The reliability of the LCMS is also tackled before presenting the real monitoring experiment. Finally, the future trend of such monitoring tools is discussed.