The ongoing reliability test (ORT) is a
hardware test process usually used in
manufacturing
Manufacturing is the creation or production of goods with the help of equipment, labor, machines, tools, and chemical or biological processing or formulation. It is the essence of secondary sector of the economy. The term may refer to ...
to ensure that
quality of the products is still of the same
specifications
A specification often refers to a set of documented requirements to be satisfied by a material, design, product, or service. A specification is often a type of technical standard.
There are different types of technical or engineering specificati ...
as the day it first went to production or general availability.
The products currently in the
manufacturing line are
randomly picked every day with a predefined percentage or numbers and then put in a control drop tower or an environmental chamber. Control drop simulates physical interactions on the product, while environmental chamber simulates the stress profile of
thermal cycling, elevated temperature, or combined environmental stresses to induce
fatigue damage. The profile should stimulate the precipitation of latent defects that may be introduced from the manufacturing process but not remove significant life from the product or introduce flaws to risk failure during its intended mission.
highly accelerated stress test The highly accelerated stress test (HAST) method was first proposed by Jeffrey E. Gunn, Sushil K. Malik, and Purabi M. Mazumdar of IBM.
The acceleration factor for elevated humidity is empirically derived to be
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is a Ongoing Reliability Test that uses the empirical operational limits as the reference for the combined vibration, thermal cycling, and other stress applied to find latent defects.
Quality of the products is then measured with the results of this test. If a unit fails, it goes under investigation to see what caused the failure and then remove the cause whether it came from an assembly process or from a component being incorrectly manufactured, or any other cause. If it is proven that a real failure occurs, the batch of units that were produced along with the failed unit, is then tagged for re-test or repair to either verify or fix the problem.
External links
OPS A La Carte's Reliability Services in the Manufacturing Phase On-Going (sic) Reliability Testing (ORT)Sample OEM contracts with contract manufacturers (CM) which specifies ORT to be a standard process (see section 7.8)Accelerated Reliability Engineering: HALT and HASS,. Gregg K. Hobbs, John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2000.
Statistical process control
Hardware testing