Break it on purpose

Highly Accelerated Life Testing during design can make products last longer and reduce service headaches. A unit clamped to the vibration table ready for testing is visible through the open door of the Halt chamber. Air ducts vector temperature-controlled air across the unit while the vibration table reaches accelerations up to 15 A close-up view of a unit under test shows the vibration clamp bars that secures the unit to the vibration table and the forced-air ducts used to heat or cool the unit. Equipment used to operate and monitor the unit under test sits outside the Halt chamber. Cables run through access holes to the unit inside the chamber. Test conditions mimic, as near as possible, actual operating parameters. After seeing forces of 15 rms, the leads of this module separated from the PC board. Engineers added a bonding agent between the module and board to minimize vibration stress on the leads. It's often crucial to test any product before it moves from design to production. More specifically, a test program called Highly Accelerated Life Testing, or Halt, can be a way to give designers valuable information that is unavailable by any other means. Halt subjects products in the design phase to a series of escalating stresses until there are failures. Although Halt destroys the prototype, the process benefits many final designs for all types of equipment and components. Engineers at Sypris Test & Measurement Inc., for example, run Halt on a variety of telecommunication, medical, semiconductor, military, and avionics equipment. Sypris engineers recently teamed with designers at Varian Semiconductor Equipment Associates Inc. to perform Halt on Varian's system controllers. The controllers operate an integral pump critical to ion implantation in semiconductor processing. Halt uncovered problems designers did not anticipate that let Varian designers fix issues early in the design