Tips to Avoid Reliability Risks: Five Considerations in Electronic Design

Electronic devices and systems are simultaneously becoming smaller, faster and more powerful — not to mention more connected than ever before. But as customer expectations grow, delivering reliable performance becomes more complex. Engineers and system architects are forced to balance product performance with business requirements and market expectations — a scenario that often leads to compromises. 

Across industries, product reliability has become unequivocally linked to brand reputation, and failures in reliability can be devastating to a company’s brand, product success and even the adoption of new technologies. Yet the recent Molex Reliability and Hardware Design Survey of 756 design engineers and system architects found only 3% of respondents cite reliability as the top priority when evaluating design tradeoffs. 

Here are five design considerations that engineers are unwilling to sacrifice and the innovations that are driving reliability assurance. 

Although technically two different criteria, a product’s cost and manufacturability often go hand-in-hand — and the data supports the correlation. 50% of survey respondents cited cost and 46% listed manufacturability as the most likely design tradeoffs to be prioritized over a product’s reliability. But are tradeoffs necessary and can business requirements still be met without sacrificing reliability? 

Innovations driven by the transportation industry in predictive engineering and digital twins are challenging preconceptions. Software has long existed to support PCB design, highlight thermal hotspots and identify EMI issues. But advancements in predictive and digital twin technologies are beginning to pull the full picture together and predetermine product performance in real-world environments before physical prototyping. How does this help balance cost, manufacturability and reliability? A couple of ways include: 

Material selection – The choice of the metals, plastics and other materials used within the design of a product can greatly influence product cost, means of manufacturing and assembly and long-term reliability under typical and extreme uses. Thermal management — which has a particularly significant impact on reliability — is heavily influenced by materials. This choice can also influence manufacturing method, such as enabling the use of 3D printing. Predictive engineering can not only predict how well materials will perform, but also how well they can withstand environmental exposures and the rigors of everyday use.

Component selection – Predictive modeling can help determine whether an off-the-shelf or custom component is necessary in order to meet performance criteria — large influencers to cost — and how reliable the component will be over the product lifecycle. Molex is even using predictive engineering in the design of its own high reliability connectors and recently developed a high-fidelity digital twin that can predict a connector’s current rating with 95% accuracy and measure the effects of temporary current spikes. For an industry like transportation where reliability can affect user safety, this technology can help reduce recalls and warranty claims.  

What’s next for predictive engineering and digital twins? Companies are already beginning to pair this technology with AR/VR devices, enabling engineers to directly interact with the virtual world and environment. As this technology grows in popularity, we can expect engineers to visualize the reliability characteristics of systems, subsystems and components within — such as on the factory floor of an Industry 4.0 facility — data that will prove invaluable to controlling costs, manufacturability and reliability of future devices. Engineers are excited for this future, with almost half of respondents believing that innovations in data-driven technologies like AI, machine learning, simulations and data analytics offer the best opportunity to improve electronic product reliability over the next five years.  

It’s no surprise that trends in how consumers interact with everyday devices such as smartphones are extending into professional applications and a poor user experience (UX) may quickly doom a product’s launch.  Over 1/3 of survey respondents placed the user experience as a must, even at the expense of a product’s reliability. But the UX is a complex representation of both software and hardware design, and what may be perceived as a hardware reliability issue by the user may actually be the product of coding. Further, UX errors are also subject to external influences that may also be perceived as a reliability issue of the device. Connectivity concerns, such as data center downtime, network congestion or even interference from nearby devices can significantly disrupt the UX. How else can UX affect reliability? 

Touchscreen interactivity – The success of touchscreens on smartphones has led to their integration into devices across almost every industry. From car entertainment systems to medical devices, capacitive touch switches have reinvented what it means to control a device. For a user experience to be considered reliable, though, touch screens must be responsive, resistant to constant physical pressure and legible. Polystyrene sulfonate or poly (3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) — also known as PEDOT — is a groundbreaking organic polymer that’s ideal for the touch human-machine interfaces (HMI) of devices like home appliances. Although not as ultra-clear as traditional indium tin oxide (ITO) touch switches, PEDOT provides several performance benefits that directly support reliability, including resistance to high-temperature applications like kitchen range cooktops and greater durability when applied to curved and untraditional surfaces. 

Contactless connectivity – Emerging contactless connectivity devices, such as Molex’s MX60 series of solutions, provide several benefits to user experience while improving long term reliability when compared to traditional mechanical connectors. Contactless connectors utilize miniaturized radio frequency (RF) receivers and transceivers to wirelessly exchange data over close proximity, and can communicate in protocols such as DisplayPort, Gigabit Ethernet and USB SuperSpeed. Suddenly, two monitors can be placed alongside each other and immediately transfer their screens from one to another without a physical cable, simplifying user setup and removing the risk of damaging the connection point from misalignment or misuse. Additionally, the use of contactless connectivity can eliminate debug ports — improving the user experience of the engineer or technician involved while removing a common entry port of water and dust.  

From transportation to data centers, power consumption is on the rise as users demand faster, more feature-rich and more capable systems and devices. The survey respondents reflected this shift with 25% of respondents placing power consumption near the top of their list of priorities. But this trend has an interesting relationship with reliability as it not only poses design challenges — especially around thermal management — but it stresses the reliability of the power grid itself as it adapts to heightened use. How can engineers design for higher power without putting reliability at risk? 

High reliability connectors – Although quality is always important to delivering reliable performance, this importance is amplified in high power applications where low-quality connectors can cause damage to both the system and its surroundings. For instance, poor quality charging of EV batteries can lead to shortened lifespans, reduced driving distances and even thermal runaway. Similar risks apply in home energy storage systems where the low-quality transfer of power from renewable sources may reduce the likelihood that the battery system kicks on when it is needed most. 

For power, heat is one of the greatest threats to reliability. When evaluating connectors for high power applications, it’s important to not only consider the current but also specialized design characteristics such as large contact surfaces and low contact resistance to minimize heat generation.

The growing prevalence of IoT devices and increasing sophistication of systems throughout every industry are placing complex electronics into a wider array of environmental conditions and use cases. This hasn’t gone unnoticed by product designers. 23% of engineers consider a product’s ability to withstand environmental and use conditions as one of their primary design criteria. The use of predictive analytics engineering is one way to ensure durability without sacrificing other aspects of reliability, but what else can be done? Let’s again look to transportation. 

Learning from vehicles – Few applications expose electronic systems to a wider range of harsh conditions than the transportation industry. The components used within a car or truck must be capable of withstanding water, dust, extreme temperatures and persistent vibrations. In a sense, vehicles can be seen as an enormous real-world test of component reliability, and those that have met the rigors of the road can survive almost anything. The same connectors that may be traditionally classified as designed for transportation are also ideal for industrial robotics, outdoor lighting, agricultural equipment and watercraft. A washing machine creates exposure to liquids, heat, cold and vibration. A drone may fly through high winds and moisture-saturated air. A solar farm can be exposed to summer heat and winter weather. Vehicles and the components within have proven resistant to it all. 

When considering connector reliability for environmental conditions and everyday use, seek:

• Rugged housings with high ingress protection (IP) ratings such as IP67, IP68 and IP69k protect from fluid and debris
• Locking and alignment mechanisms such as connector position assurance (CPA), terminal position assurance (TPA), primary lock reinforcement (PLR), independent secondary lock (ISL) and inertia lock minimize accidental disconnection
• Wide operating temperature ranges protect from both freezing and high heat conditions

As engineers face increasingly complex challenges to reliability, suppliers play an increasingly important role. Over 90% of respondents agree that you cannot build reliable products without trusted and proven suppliers. But an even more overwhelming 96% of respondents have changed part suppliers due to reliability issues — and 28% reported changing suppliers frequently. Can suppliers support their customers’ growing demands? 

Molex is up to the challenge — and our history proves it. More than 80 years of experience providing innovative, high quality interconnect solutions is supported by our global, multi-disciplinary engineering team, cutting-edge technologies and commitment to customers first. Collaboration alongside our customers is at the heart of everything we do, and we specialize in navigating the complex tradeoffs that design engineers face without sacrificing reliability. Whenever a customer works with Molex, they place their brand’s reputation in our hands. We ensure that they’ll deliver a product reliable to its core.  

Learn more about the results of our Reliability and Hardware Design Survey here.