Why Failure Analysis Is Critical To Manufacturing Process?

Failure analysis, a process that relies on collecting failed components for subsequent examination of the cause or causes of failure, is considered as one critical discipline in many branches of manufacturing process because it can effectively help in the following:

• Refinement of an existing product - many products found in the market today can still be refined with the help of failure analysis; this is with the help of several procedures including collecting data of their failed components, which are brought to a laboratory for analysis in order to determine the cause and act accordingly.
• Development of new products - in many cases, the discovery of a certain cause of failure cannot just be useful for the refinement of the existing one but, of equal importance, can lead to the development of new/other products, which can be useful to both manufacturers and consumers as well.
• Cost reductions - physical and electrical failure analysis, which helps in determining the cause of failure, reduces costs as manufacturing companies can use better materials and avoid unnecessary spending and wasting, which therefore can help reduce materials and operational costs and improves profits.

There are two popular categories under failure analysis and these are the following:

• Electrical failure analysis - some examples of electrical failure analysis work can be done during dielectric breakdown, component failure, arc tracking/conductive path tracking, poor quality solder joints, floating neutrals and high voltage transients, oxidation and corrosion of electrical connections, and contamination of circuit boards. Mechanisms used as part of electrical failure analysis include Analytical Probe Station, Curve-Trace (Manual & Automated); Emission Microscopy (Near Infrared); Florescent Micro-Thermal Imaging with Lock-In; Laser Stimulation Microscopy.
• Physical failure analysis - this becomes increasingly important for process optimization for situations like when there is a continued shrinking of materials used in a certain manufacturing process. In cases like the one specified, a particular manufacturing facility can do the analysis (or hire a third party to do it) such as 3-D X-ray Tomography, C-scanning acoustic Microscopy, De-Capsulation, Deprocessing, FIB-SEM Cross Sectioning, Mechanical Cross-Sectioning, Real-time X-ray - among other physical failure analysis procedures.

More and more companies in the manufacturing sector have recognized the importance of failure analysis and have incorporated this procedure in their own system for product refinement and development of new ones.