At times of austerity, Reliability can become victim to ill-informed CEOs and CFOs. Some CEOs regard Reliability as a box ticking exercise, while CFOs can inflict unwarranted short-cuts or even avoidance of necessary assurance. As an industrialist, these are my observations and experience of today including involvement in dispute resolution which has resulted in bringing the culprits to book. Severe fines, loss of trade and cash flow are also the consequences when the chickens come home to roost.

Achieving reliability when you make something requires understanding how the product works and its functional vulnerabilities. This is what my team set out to do in my most recent leadership responsibility in developing advanced photonics. Designers always, and rightly, push the boundaries. This must be done in partnership with all the disciplines in a company, including reliability engineering. For instance, while in my role as VP in photonics, a bright, high-calibre graduate conceived a multiplexer involving refraction of white light, requiring temperature control of the specific element to within 0.2^oC. Two challenges arose: Firstly, to measure the element to an accuracy of 0.1^oC. Secondly, to understand how the temperature may drift beyond the limits. The reliability solutions led to development of precision temperature management – and not just loading the device into a black-box test.

Responsible reliability development requires us as reliability engineers to support low cost solutions. My mantra is ‘Fitness for purpose’ – avoiding over-engineering and achieving cost-effective solutions. If interested in my analyses and solutions, read my presentation at SERE in Washington, DC, June 2013.

However, decades before SERE, my task was to find low cost high rel solutions for the emerging digital telecoms switching systems. In this endeavour, I sought two solutions (i) low cost electronics that could be engineered to be high reliability, (ii) understanding the environments in which the digital systems would be used. It became evident to me that the applications would be wider than the benign environments of the then developed world, and extended to the emerging third world with more hostile environments. Because the known reliability assurance methods of the day were geared towards the more benign climates, and being aware that hostile climates would be hotter and more humid, my thinking process led me to invent HAST - a method of emulating and accelerating ageing of the more severe climatic operation. Not only did I have to create a non-saturating accelerated stress chamber, I also had to establish a valid model that would relate overstress to actual operation. Non-saturating high-temperature and high humidity was achieved by buying and re-engineering 20 hospital autoclaves to have independent pressure control and different temperature zones (today HAST chambers are available from a number of commercial manufacturers). Based on many millions of device hours of experiment, the S-H model was established. A necessary part of such a model was and is knowledge of the climates of actual operation. Hence I sought and launched the ITU investigation to determine climatic conditions for operation of electronics in various climates.

Both HAST and the S-H model are now incorporated in JEDEC JESD22 reliability test specs. Initially JEDEC over-specified but now have set the conditions to those I have. Reliability specifications should never be used ‘off the shelf’. I always exhort my engineering colleagues to determine validity to their own products of published stress models and specifications. This is what my team undertook and delivered in achieving high reliability photonics at the company that is now Oclaro.

Addressing the future, I am keen that knowledge, experience and resoluteness is passed forward. So, I established the First Foundation of reliability engineers. During 2013 I identified groups of intelligent and receptive PhD reliability students at the Universities of Greenwich, London, and Heriot-Watt, Edinburgh, and trained them intensively in the fundamentals and practical approaches to reliability development and assurance of electronics and photonics. Because the First Foundation will not have practitioner experience, I am establishing the Second Foundation Expert Group comprising those who have worked with me and are dealing with practical issues of product reliability in industry. As with all engineers, this Second Foundation must stay ahead of the game in their knowledge and solutions and be resolute champions to steer the engineering community to deliver genuine reliability in products.

The citation refers to other diagnostics methods I have invented and implemented. It is however inappropriate to trawl through a full list of achievements in an acceptance address.

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Note: We included this particular speech, presented by Nihal Sinnadurai at the acceptance of his Reliability Society Lifetime Achievement Award, because it fit so well the general idea of "Letters in Reliability," as a technically oriented paper, specifically addressing reliability issues, that are of general interest to the RS members. Enjoy. -- Editor