Establishing ecoreliability of electronic devices in manufacturing environments

EcoReliability describes the inclusion of reliability aspects into the environmentally conscious design of electronic systems to address the originally separated domains from one mutual perspective. This paper motivates the importance of such an approach for the case of electronic products and in particular embedded electronics. Environmental analysis of electronics has often been narrowed down to energy use, but the total resource use is now seen as equally important. Using technical examples from promising applications in robust electronics for manufacturing equipment, measures in system design aiming at an increase of sustainability through determination of a truly balanced degree of reliability are presented. The first case is taken from the field of power electronics with demanding requirements towards robustness. Measures to increase the allowable number of thermal cycles during operation are compared towards shifts in environmental attributes. For the second case, miniaturized sensors are introduced that face issues of obsolescence when applied to machine tool environments in long-term scenarios