Qualmark’s latest HALT/HASS lab partner in China, Semipower Power Device Testing & Application Center in Xi’an, held their grand opening November 16 to coincide with the annual CSIA-ICCAS Conference where Qualmark CEO, Andy Drenick, served as a VIP guest and was a featured speaker.

The lab’s grand opening included a formal signing ceremony of the partnership agreement between Qualmark and Semipower. A seminar, Hi-rel Device/System Testing and Assurance, was held and the day concluded with a dinner where distinguished guests representing influential Chinese governmental agencies, leading universities, prominent commercial enterprises and large electronics manufactures could meet and discuss development ideas.

Qualmark is pleased to be a major sponsor of RAMS 2012 – the Annual Reliability and Maintainability Symposium – which will be held in Reno, Nevada, January 23-26, 2012. In the exhibit booth, Qualmark will reveal its very latest accelerated reliability test technology and how it can transform the way in which electronics manufacturers will want to approach their reliability testing programs going forward.

In addition to sharing information in the booth, Qualmark plans to host a reception for RAMS attendees wishing to learn more about the beneficial impact of adding HASS/A (Highly Accelerated Stress Screening/Audit) to their reliability program. The invitation list is still being formulated, so if you wish to spend more time with us learning about Qualmark technology, let us know by sending an email to events@qualmark.com.

Qualmark’s Center of Excellence (COE) reports a recent, very rewarding project (for our application engineers as well as the customer) and serves as an example of how our COE team is so effective in helping to solve customer issues. This customer’s electronic product must operate with near perfect reliability in a high temperature and vibration environment. A failure in the product could cost the company as much as a half million dollars per incident – and they had experienced failures. Their own tests had not revealed the failure mode.

Our customer’s needs were twofold; could the COE team reproduce the failure mode, and show that a new vendor under evaluation by our customer would be less likely to have the failure mode? HALT was performed on samples from both vendors – their unusual shapes requiring COE fixturing expertise to ensure vibration stresses drove into every component in the system ...

USEF - Institute for Unmanned Space Experiment Free Flyer
Mr. Matsushi Miura, a senior researcher for Japan’s USEF (Institute for Unmanned Space Experiment Free Flyer) recently visited Qualmark’s Denver headquarters and discussed the role Qualmark technology has played in their reliability research. USEF, established in 1986, is a government funded non-profit organization to promote research and development of space systems and to contribute to the international space community. Traveling with Miura san was Mr. Ikuya Arai of TOYO, Qualmark’s distributor in Japan who helps support USEF’s program with education and training. Following the Denver meeting, Miura san flew to California where he was a keynote speaker at the 2011 ASTR (Accelerated Stress Testing and Reliability) workshop.

CALCE – Center for Advanced Life Cycle Engineering
Qualmark has been affiliated with CALCE, the University of Maryland’s Center for Advanced Life Cycle Engineering, since its inception, providing the Typhoon 1.5 HALT/HASS system which aids CALCE’s research in product reliability.  A recent series of group and individual meetings were culminated with 3 of CALCE’s graduate research assistants visiting Qualmark’s Denver headquarters where they were able to observe HALT/HASS system manufacturing, visit Qualmark’s Center of Excellence and meet with Qualmark management and application engineers.

CALCE is the largest electronic products and systems research center focused on electronics reliability, is dedicated to providing a knowledge and resource base to support the development of competitive electronic components, products and systems.

Ms. Angel Wong, Officer-In-Charge for the Reliability Testing Centre of HKPC (Hong Kong Productivity Council), became the first Certified Reliability Professional (CRP) in Asia Pacific during the recent International Applied Reliability Symposium (ARS) held in October in Singapore.

Her presentation Life Prediction of Energy Saving Lamp Using Quantitative Accelerated Life Test Program merited a score of 4 out of a possible 5 and completed the final step toward certification. The CRP program is a professional certification program for reliability engineers designed to distinguish professionals who have gained and successfully demonstrated unquestionable expertise in the field of reliability engineering.

In early 2012 Qualmark’s UK partner, Alphatech, will obtain UKAS accreditation to the ISO 17025 standard. Alphatech operates a Qualmark Typhoon 2.5 HALT system and represents, distributes & services Qualmark technology in the UK and other parts of Europe.

Alphatech’s Business Manager Stephen Mathews commented that UKAS accreditation to the ISO 17025 Test House standard brings the following:

• Objective assessment of machine, process, facility & key test engineers by an “authorized” body.
• The ability for clients to differentiate between a structured full HALT/HASS process and outwardly similar but less effective testing.

Qualmark lab partners, Reliant Labs in Sunnyvale, CA and NEHL (New England HALT Labs) in Hopkington, MA recently held very well attended open houses with attendees representing a mix of industries including aerospace, medical devices, military, and a wide variety of consumer electronics.

Kirk Gray, of Accelerated Reliability Solutions, was the featured speaker at both open houses and demonstrated the value of performing Highly Accelerated Stress Testing to help detect soft failures in addition to hard failures and the value of catching both failures early in the design process while changes can be implemented at a relatively low cost

Both labs have extensive accelerated stress test experience and provide the opportunity for ODMs and OEMs to verify proof of concept for HALT and HASS prior to fully committing to capital equipment purchase.