Stress + Extreme Conditions + Prolong Time = Acceleration of “Normal/Useful life”ĭynamic Burn-in : the device is exposed to high voltage and temperature extremes while being subjected to various input stimuli.Burn In Fundamentally performs the following:.Burn-in is applied to products as they are made, to detect early failures caused by faults in manufacturing practice.The thermal temperature of the burn-in test chamber can range from 25☌ to 140☌.
It usually requires the electrical and thermal testing of a product, using an expected operating electrical cycle (extreme of operating condition), typically over a time period of 48-168 hours. A burn-in test specification varies depending on the device and testing standard (military or telecom standards).With burn-in testing, an Automatic Test Equipment (ATE) will stress the device, accelerating these dormant faults to manifest as failures and screen out failures during the infant mortality stage.īurn-in testing detects faults that are generally due to imperfections in manufacturing and packaging processes, which are becoming more common with the increasing circuit complexity and aggressive technology scaling. These faults are dormant and randomly manifest into device failures during device life-cycle. The root cause of fails detected during burn-in testing can be identified as dielectric failures, conductor failures, metallization failures, electromigration, etc. What Causes Components to Fail During Burn-in? It is possible to describe wearout mathematically allowing the concept of reliability and, hence, lifetime prediction. This regime of failure is of particular concern in denoting the lifetime of the product. Wearout is the natural end-of-life of a component or system related to continuous use as a result of materials interaction with the environment. It is important to note that burn-in test is usually used to filter out devices that fail during the “infant mortality stage” (beginning of bathtub curve) and does not take into count the “lifetime” or wearout (end of the bath tub curve) – this is where reliability testing comes into play. Burn-in of a board or an assembly is difficult because different components have different limits. It is best to burn-in at the component level when the cost of testing and replacing parts is lowest. Normally burn-in tests are performed on electronic devices such as laser diodes with an Automatic Test Equipment laser diode burn-in system that runs the component for an extended period of time to detect problems.Ī burn-in system will use cutting-edge technology to test the component and provide precision temperature control, power and optical (if required) measurements to ensure the precision and reliability required for manufacturing, engineering evaluation, and R&D applications.īurn-in testing may be conducted to ensure that a device or system functions properly before it leaves the manufacturing plant or to confirm new semiconductors from the R&D lab are meeting designed operating requirements. Burn-in testing is the process by which a system detects early failures in semiconductor components (infant mortality), thereby increasing a semiconductor component reliability.