Know Your Safety Application Notes (Part 1): Failure Rates (Download)
Failure rate or base failure rate refers to the number of failures per unit of time, typically in terms of failures in time (FITs) equivalent to one failure in a billion hours, which can be expected to occur for the product during its useful lifetime. Figure 1 shows the reliability bathtub curve model for failure of electronic components that can be divided into three sections: early life or infant mortality failures, useful life or constant (random) failures, and wear-out failures. Thus, this article focuses on failure rates during the useful life of the component.