Know Your Safety Application Notes (Part 1): Failure Rates (Download)

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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.