KATS Seminar to Build Reliability in Korean Products in Overseas Markets
- Building confidence in Korean goods to reduce imports of core parts, raw materials

The Korea Agency for Standards and Technology(KATS) hosted an international seminar under the title of "2005 Overseas Experts Invitation Seminar on Reliability" dedicated to upgrading technology in Korea.
KATS Administrator Yoon Kyo-won said, in his opening speech of the seminar, that this year's annual event is particularly significant in that professor Han Bong-tae of CALCE Center of the University of Maryland has been invited to attend
He said as has been widely reported in media, exports last year expanded 31.2 percent despite a number of critical problems such as high oil prices and strong won currency to total $254.2 billion, making Korea the 12th country to export more than $250 billion in goods and services. The current account surplus doubled from the previous year to $29.7 billion, the highest in history.
But these exports depended on five key products including semiconductor,wireless communication equipment, automobiles, computer and vessels, which make up 44.2 percent of total exports.
He went on to note that trade surpluses with the United States and China have been rising, but trade deficit with Japan has been widening from $19 billion in 2003 to $23.4 billion last year. This is because Korean exporters import parts and raw material from Japan due to the lack of comparable goods in the country. Due to the lack of technology and small market, the development of new technology has been limited and even if the technology is developed, Korean exporters tended to import core parts from foreign countries due to the lack of trust in those technologies and products. The government has been investing 160 billion won in the development of core parts and raw material and an additional 40 billion won to raise their trust so that competitive edges and trade accounts of related industries would be improved, the KATS administrator said.
Due to such an effort, there have been some encouraging developments toward reducing trade deficits by replacing imported parts with domestic products centered around condensers.
But according to the survey on durability of cars made by J.D. Power, customers were very satisfied with Korean cars in the first three months after buying them, ranking second to Japanese cars, but the durability after three years dropped to 32nd in ranking, showing that we still have a long way to go to upgrade the trust in Korean products.
The government set up the first five-year plan to upgrade the trust in Korean products and is in the middle of promoting its second five-year plan from this year based on results from the first plan to secure international competitiveness of related industries by acquiring trust assurances. The second plan will be focused on the development of trustworthy technology and its expansion.
Yoon said word trustworthy is not just a modifier and we should not try just to secure a framework base, but really have parts and raw materials developed in the country to survive from competition with advanced countries including the United States and Japan.
For this purpose, the industry would have to redouble its efforts to boost the trust in its products through the investigation of breakdowns of its products and the prediction of life cycles. He promised that the government will do all it can to provide information and equipment, building of database and others to build infrastructure to boost trustworthiness of Korean products.
The seminar was expected to develop standards for the evaluation of trust through education on their sample cases and provide guidelines for trust evaluation. They also expect to be able to solve various problems occurring during the process of trust evaluation by various organizations based on trust evaluation samples of electronic products and in module states. Professor Han, in his presentation, said there are many for products fail; They are designed to fail; manufactured to fail; assembled to fail; screened to fail; stored to fail; transported to fail; and operated to fail.
Reliability assessment is probability that a system will operate satisfactorily for an accepted period of time in the field application for which it is intended ; or ability of a product to properly function within specified performance limits, for a specified period of time, and under the life cycle application conditions.
The professor said qualification is a process to verify whether the anticipated reliability is indeed achievable. Fundamental reliability concepts include reliability, unreliability, failure probability density function, hazard rate, conditional reliability, and mean time to failure.
For considerations in practice, he said, "a statistical analysis alone does not provide a magic way of projecting into the future." "Results are only as good as the assumed model and assumptions."
What is Physics-of-Failure? He said physics of failure is a methodology which includes root-cause failure analysis, and evaluation of the impact of defects and stresses on product reliability. Based on these analyses, processes for design, manufacture, assembly, and support are provided to eliminate failures.
He said elements of a PoF Foundation includes materials and architecture database, defects and failure mechanisms database, physics of failure reliability modeling tools, cost-effective qualification and screening guidelines, methods to determine the root-cause of failure and people with an inquisitive nature. Physics-of-failure is not new. PoF has been the key reliability methodology approach for applications such as aircraft structure, ships, automobiles, roads, buildings, and bridges. But the application of a PoF approach to electronic systems is relatively new.
PoF approach will determine the likely failure mechanisms; Include information on model applicability and limitations. If a "model" does not exist, then the associated materials, product architecture or manufacturing process must be addressed.
Review the various stresses and their limits for each failure mechanism (determine the design and test requirements.) Perform a thorough failure analysis of each part, interconnection, etc. tested, until failure mechanism is determined.
On how do we characterize reliability, professor Han presented different perspectives. He said reliability statisticians are interested in tracking system level failure data for logistic purposes, and in determining how the bathtub curve looks. He said causes are; infant mortality, "random" failures and wearout. He said reliability engineers and designers using PoF principles desire to figure out the root-causes of failures and how to reduce failures.
Overstress failure is a failure which arises as a result of a single load condition. Examples of loan conditions that can cause overstress failure are shock, temperature extremes, and electrical overstress. In the broadest sense, a load condition can be visual inspection, where, for example, one observes some imperfection, which causes the product to be considered a failure. In this case, the load condition is the customers acceptance of the value of the parameter associated with a product.
Wearout failure is a failure which arises as a result of cumulative load conditions. Examples of load conditions that cause cumulative damage are temperature cycling, wear, and material ageing. nw