accelerated life testing

**Accelerated life testing** compresses **years of wear into days or weeks** by applying elevated stress (temperature, voltage, current) to make failure mechanisms manifest quickly, enabling lifetime prediction before product shipping. **What Is Accelerated Life Testing?** - **Definition**: High-stress testing to accelerate failure mechanisms. - **Stressors**: Temperature, voltage, current, mechanical, environmental. - **Purpose**: Predict product lifetime from short-duration tests. **Acceleration Principles**: Most failures increase exponentially with temperature (Arrhenius), voltage (power-law), or current density (Black's equation). **Common Tests**: HTOL (temperature/voltage), TDDB (voltage), electromigration (current), thermal cycling (temperature), humidity testing (environmental). **Analysis**: Weibull plots, time-to-failure distributions, acceleration factor calculation, field lifetime extrapolation. **Applications**: Reliability qualification, process validation, design verification, warranty prediction. Accelerated life testing is **reliability engineer's time machine** — revealing future failures today through physics-based acceleration.