If It Ain’t Broke, Fix It – A Coto Technology One Pager

Regarding the value of preventive maintenance strategies and reed relay board replacement in ATE applications.

Yes, you read it correctly. Believe it or not, it can make economic sense to throw away all the relays on a printed circuit board even if none have failed. The economic justification depends on the cost of the individual relays, how many there are on the board, the expected life of the relays, and what it costs to find and replace a failed part.  Consider an Automated Testing Equipment (ATE) channel card with sixteen relays, each having an expected life of one billion cycles. This is typical for Coto’s ATE-grade relays. The board can be regarded as a system that fails if any individual relay fails. Coto determines expected relay life by electrical load testing over billions of switching cycles, followed by Weibull statistical analysis. This produces two statistics: the mean cycles before failure (MCBF) and the Weibull slope, typically about 2 for a good quality reed relay. A board with sixteen relays has one quarter the MCBF of an individual relay, in this case giving an estimated board MCBF of 250 million cycles.