Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[Elmer Phud]

Economaniac -

Reliability testing, Comb probably can speak better to this but my understanding is that semi co's guarantee that no more than a certain percentage will fail over a fixed period of time subject to certain conditions- ie less than .5% failure over 20 years at -20-120C. For consumer products the manufacturer can then calculate the total probability of failure over the warrantied product life.

A commonly used term is DPM, or Defects Per Million. It is broken down into 2 basic parts, quality and reliability. Quality means how many dead soldiers do you have at time zero after shipping to the customer. Reliability means how many die prematurly during the useable life of the product. Cosmetic defects fall into the Quality category. I would expect that AMD is not far behind Intel in these metrics although I have no data. For Desktop products a level of <500 DPM (Total of Quality and Reliability failures) is probably what Intel and AMD are shipping however Servers may require an even lower defecr rate. I have seen DPM requirements drop into the low single digits for some applications where failures are extremely problematic. How these levels are achieved is a science unto itself and where my expertize lies.

EP