Daily Archives: 9-February-2016

One of the more distasteful tasks I need to do is make estimates of annual product failure rates using MTBF predictions based on part count methods. I find this task distasteful because I have never seen any indication that MTBF predictions are correlated in any way with field failure rates. This is not solely my observation – the US Army has cancelled its use of part count method MTBF predictions (i.e. based on MIL-HDBK-217). However, the telecommunications industry has continued to use these predictions through their use of SR-332. If you want to see a simple example of an SR-332-based reliability prediction, see this very clear example from Avago. Continue reading →