Determination of optimal burn‐in condition – a case study in switch mode rectifier

Burn‐in is an effective means of screening out the infant mortality components of a system. Most related studies investigated burn‐in by curve fitting for a failure model and cost for an optimal burn‐in time model and environmental stress model. However, those investigations did not provide an effective method to determine the optimal burn‐in condition for a practical operation. As a result, this study presents an effective procedure that uses part stress analysis and robust design techniques to determine the optimal burn‐in operational environment. A case study of the production of a switch mode rectifier is performed and compared with the traditional approach, to examine the proposed procedure’s effectiveness. Those results show that the proposed procedure generalizes well, and can screen out the early failure of material and manufacturing process.