Recoverability effects on reliability assessment for accelerated degradation testing

Accelerated Degradation Testing (ADT) provides an efficient experimental approach to collect lifetime-related data for the reliability assessment of highly reliable products under normal use stress. Recoverability, which occurs in many typical failure modes when online in-chamber measurements have to be replaced by offline ex-chamber measurements with stress released, is an important factor that may affect the accuracy of reliability estimation from ADT data. Nonetheless, the presence of recoverability has not been adequately considered in traditional methods, leading to an over-optimistic estimation of lifetime and reliability. The linkage between recoverability and such inferential bias has not been theoretically studied systematically. In this study, recoverability is explicitly incorporated into the ADT modeling framework. Without loss of generality, the Wiener process is adopted as the basis for the proposed degradation model, superimposed with a cumulative recovery. Theoretical results show that the Mean Time To Failure (MTTF) will be overestimated with recoverability neglected, which leads to poor lifetime-centered decision-making. For finite and even small sample sizes, this conclusion is not intuitively certain but the chance is still high and the corresponding overestimation probability can be calculated explicitly. All theoretical conclusions are validated by simulation studies, in which the MTTFs are overestimated from 6% to 42% under different parameter settings. The real-world application of semiconductor products shows that even slight recoverability could lead to an obvious overestimation of MTTF and the proposed model provides a convenient way to derive more accurate assessment results.