Prognostics and Health Monitoring of Electronics

Interest has been growing in monitoring the ongoing health of products and systems in order to predict failures and provide warnings in advance of catastrophic failure. Here, relative health is defined as the extent of degradation or deviation from an expected normal condition. Prognostics is the prediction of the future state of health based on current and historical health conditions. While the application of health monitoring is well established for the assessment of mechanical systems, this is not the case for electronic systems. However, electronics are integral to the functionality of most systems today, and their reliability is often critical for system reliability. This chapter provides a basic understanding of prognostics and health monitoring of products and systems and the techniques being developed to enable prognostics for electronic systems.