Hardware designs have become increasingly complex. Without any meaningful uses of reliability data, the effects of failures on ones product can be easily overlooked. FMEA takes the output of ones reliability prediction and determines the component criticality of each failure mode to help assess risk. After a review with Engineering, failure analysis of failure modes can lead to optimized design changes to improve reliability, maintainability, and availability. Typically, this exercise yields the top or most critical failure modes in a design and together with Engineering, risk mitigation steps are planned.
FMEA will satisfy the following objectives:
v A comprehensive identification and evaluation of SPOFs and critical component failure modes (CPU failing, memory structure, single bit errors, ECC, FPGA failure, power components, etc.)
v Determination of the priority for addressing each failure mode with respect to the system’s correct function or performance and the impact on the process concerned
v Classification of identified failure modes according to relevant characteristics, including their ease of detection, capability to be diagnosed, testability, compensating and operating provisions (repair, maintenance, logistics, etc.)
v Identification of system functional failures and estimation of measures of the severity and probability of failure
v Suggestions for design improvement to help mitigate the effects of failure
Cumulative failure rates used for criticality assessment and occurrence probabilities are based on Telcordia’s SR-332, Reliability Prediction Procedure for Electronic Equipment. This allows one complete set of work from prediction, to system analysis, and through to FMEA.