The alpha power Weibull transformation distribution applied to describe the behavior of electronic devices under voltage stress profile

Abstract

This paper presents a life-stress methodology that models the failure rate in the form of a bathtub curve. The model consists of the Alpha Power Transformation (APT), which adds an extra parameter to the probability distributions to achieve better flexibility in the representation in the data analysis. To build the life–stress relationship, the APT is combined with the Weibull Distribution (WD) and the Inverse Power Law (IPL) as a stress model to relate the data from the accelerated life tests (ALT), thus presenting the APTW-IPL. Statistical properties of the APTW-IPL are analyzed and discussed. For the parameter estimation of APTW-IPL, the Maximum Likelihood Estimator was used. On the other hand, to test the efficacy of the APTW-IPL, the model is compared with other methodologies that describe the behavior of the bathtub curve in two case studies related to determining the behavior of electronic devices that were subjected to ALT. The results show that the APTW-IPL can be a good option for reliability analysis in electronic devices. It represents the failure times in the form of a bathtub curve, the value of MTTF, and fitting the distribution to the case study data.