How does Nitronex determine reliability of its parts?
Nitronex performs extensive reliability testing on all products prior to production release. A cross-functional team meets to outline the qualification plan for a product and then the reliability engineers execute to the plan. Long-term drift is characterized through 3-temp DC life-testing, DC-HTOL, and RF-HTOL testing. To date ~500,000 hours of DC-HTOL have been collected on Nitronex devices. Furthermore the robustness of the technology is examined through such tests as ESD and VSWR mismatch tests. Finally, mechanical aspects of a product are tested via autoclave, temperature cycling, and bond pull to name a few. Complete details of our NRF1 process qualification can be found here. Q: How good is Nitronex’s reliability? A: While different test methodologies and forms of reporting data make direct comparisons difficult, Nitronex believes its reliability is on par with existing technologies such as Si-LDMOS and GaAs pHEMTs. Some common metrics are MTTF (mean-time-to-failure). In this ca
