Apr 22, 2008 The IEEE International Reliability Physics Symposium's (IRPS) 46th annual conference announces the keynote speaker of this year's event will be Dr. Michael Pecht, chair professor and the director of the Center for Advanced Life Cycle Engineering (CALCE) at the University of Maryland. This year's IRPS takes place from April 27 through May 1, 2008, at the Hyatt Regency Phoenix at Civic Plaza in Phoenix. Dr. Pecht will be speaking on Tuesday, April 29.
Dr. Pecht's address, "A New Approach to Qualification Testing" confronts the fact that over the past 10 years there have been an increasingly large number of products that have passed qualification tests, but have failed in the field. The resulting costs of these failures have been in the billions of dollars for many companies.
In his keynote address, Dr. Pecht will introduce prognostics as a process of assessing the extent of deviation or degradation of a product from its expected normal operating conditions, and then, based on continuous monitoring, predicting the future reliability of the product. By monitoring key control signals and loads, this data can be used in conjunction with precursor reasoning algorithms and stress-and-damage models to enable prognostics.
Prof Michael Pecht has an MS in Electrical Engineering and an MS and PhD in Engineering Mechanics from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He is a Professional Engineer, an IEEE Fellow and an ASME Fellow. He served as chief editor of the IEEE Transactions on Reliability for eight years and on the advisory board of IEEE Spectrum. He is chief editor for Microelectronics Reliability and an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Components and Packaging Technology. He is the founder of CALCE Center at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he is also the George Dieter Chair Professor in Mechanical Engineering and also a Professor in Applied Mathematics. He has written more than twenty books on electronic products development, use and supply chain management and over 400 technical articles. He has been leading a research team in the area of prognostics for the past ten years, and has now formed the CALCE Prognostics and Health Management Consortium at the University of Maryland. He has consulted for over 50 major international electronics companies, providing expertise in strategic planning, design, test, prognostics, IP and risk assessment of electronic products and systems. He was awarded the highest reliability honor, the IEEE Reliability Societyʼs Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007. He has previously received the European Micro and Nano-Reliability Award for outstanding contributions to reliability research, 3M Research Award for electronics packaging, the IEEE Undergraduate Teaching Award, and the IMAPS William D. Ashman Memorial Achievement Award for his contributions in electronics reliability analysis.
About IRPS
For more than four decades, IRPS has been one of the leading meetings for engineers in the area of electronic component reliability. IRPS promotes the comprehension of reliability and performance of integrated circuits and microelectronic assemblies through an improved understanding of failure mechanisms in the user's environment. Originally started in the early 1960s by the military and aerospace community, IRPS is now sponsored by IEEE Reliability Society and IEEE Electron Devices Society. All accepted IRPS papers will appear in the symposium proceedings publication, as well as on the Virtual IRPS DVD-ROM, which is available now for the previous 2007 IRPS.
