| Objectives | Background | Approach |
Identify the common weak link (interface/interconnection) in
portable electronic products. This identification will guide the
development of required modeling strategies to insure the design
of rugged product.
Advanced electronic packaging is nowhere more evident than in portable electronic products. Cell phones, pagers, and pda's are becoming smaller and smaller, with more and more features, but are still being dropped in normal daily handling. Dropping the product on a hard surface is the source of most product return/failure. Each company keeps this data confidential, but commonalities exist across product lines. Identifying and addressing these common failures will result in more rapid qualification of new designs for all companies.
In the simplest of terms this project will drop various portable electronic devices onto a hard surface and carefully conduct a failure analysis to see what breaks. The product will be instrumented with mini-accelerometers and a high-speed photographic record will record the primary and secondary impacts. If a failure is observed, a failure analysis will be conducted to determine what failed. The objective is not to determine critical drop height, or what product is more rugged than another (though this is a side result that will be available). The objective is to categorize the failures and determine the common failures across different products. The common failure will give guidance to what are the critical issues that need common attention. This will guide future research.
Some candidate products that will be tested include, pagers, pda's, and cell phones. The products will be directly purchased so that the failure data can be freely distributed amongst the members without proprietary issues being involved. Each product will include more than one sample to insure reproducibility.