Abstract
Stress burn-in is an effective burn-in means of screening out the infant mortality components of a system which are conducted under an extremely stressful environment. While investigating stresses, screening burn-in by thermal stress, voltage stress, or mechanical shock stress, most related studies failed to develop an effective method to determine the optimal burn-in time and burn-in cost for a practical operation. Therefore, this study presents an effective procedure that adopts robust design techniques and the accelerated stress test to determine the optimal burn-in time and burn-in cost. A case study of the production of switch mode rectifier demonstrates the proposed procedure's effectiveness. Moreover, the results show that the proposed procedure generalizes well, and can screen out the early failure from material and manufacturing process. © 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.