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2008
Conference Paper
Titel
Sustainability by Using Used Assemblies in Automotive Electronics
Abstract
The electronics market is characterized by short innovation cycles. It is becoming increasingly difficult for suppliers to provide spare parts during an automobile's entire product life cycle. The innovation cycle and the production period of electronic assemblies are clearly lower than the product life cycle of automobiles. Nevertheless in the automotive industry the supply of spare parts by tier-1 suppliers has to be guaranteed for a period of about 20 years. Due to these constraints, a gap results regarding the supply of spare parts. In this situation, beside the supply options like "periodic manufacturing" and "long term storage" of new assemblies the option "reuse" of used electronic assemblies is becoming more important. Knowledge about the reliability is an essential prerequisite for applying the option of "reuse of electronic assemblies". It is important to get a better understanding of ageing mechanisms depending on specific use conditions and to obtain knowledge about possibilities to estimate the reliability of used electronic assemblies. Used electronic assemblies with different mileage and thermal conditions were investigated in relation to their failure and ageing mechanism with the intention to describe the correlation between life cycle of the unit and the ageing mechanism and the expected reliability. Information about the condition of electronic systems in use supports the reuse of electronic assemblies for spare part supply. An approach to condition monitoring using monitoring structures is described. These structures are more susceptible to certain loads, thus the structures fail earlier than functional components. From this, knowledge about reusability can be obtained.