Mr. Albrecht, can you explain what “trustworthiness in electronics” means?

Modern electronics and microelectronics play an essential role in almost every part of our lives. As key technologies, they are fundamental components of modern mobility, energy supply security, and industrial manufacturing processes – to name just a few examples. However, electronics are only trustworthy if they fulfill their function exactly as they were conceived and designed by developers – and over a long period of time. Users must be able to rely on them at all times. Safety on the road or in manufacturing processes can only be guaranteed if the functioning of electronic components and systems at the heart of modern vehicles or industrial plants is accurate and stable. So, if electronics work reliably and safely, they are also trustworthy.

In the “Trust-E” project, which was successfully completed in June 2024, Fraunhofer ENAS worked with other research partners to address precisely this issue, namely trust in electronics. What goal did the project team have in mind?

The aim of the three-year “Trust-E” project was to strengthen the trustworthiness of electronic systems. To this end, methods and processes for electronic components, modules, and systems were developed to make them significantly safer and more reliable in the future.

One focus of our work as Fraunhofer ENAS and our partners in the project was to evaluate the lifetime of power electronics, which are used, among other things, in electric drives for electric vehicles and in industrial systems. A key research question that interested us was how the health status of electronics can be determined in real-time and how the remaining useful life of electronic components and thus entire assemblies can be estimated. We also investigated what measures can be taken to extend the service life of electronics, so that users can trust in the reliability of the overall system and are not put at risk.

Can you give an example of the impact that answering these research questions could have on users’ everyday lives in the future?

To achieve this, electronics must become “smart”. This means they must be able to self-diagnose and monitor themselves. They have to independently recognize that an electronic component is highly likely to fail in the next few weeks, for example, due to material fatigue.

Using the example of driving a car, this means that the vehicle’s power is automatically reduced based on this information, so that it does not break down on the open road, but reaches its destination or the nearest garage safely. By obtaining this information from the system early on, maintenance or repairs can also be initiated before a critical situation arises and a defect or unexpected failure occurs.

Looking to the future, the use of self-diagnostics in the field of electronics not only enables imminent failure of the electronics to be detected at an early stage, but also means that measures to extend the lifetime can be initiated immediately.

Trust in the reliability of electronics also plays an important role in autonomous driving, because the safety of the occupants depends decisively on correct and safe decisions made by the on-board electronics.

If research and industry ensure greater safety and reliability through technological solutions, this will greatly improve user trust and acceptance of new technologies in the long term.

Trustworthiness in electronic components and systems is not only relevant to automotive applications. In what other applications do electronics have to work reliably and safely?

Ensuring that electronic modules and entire systems work reliably for a long time is important and highly exciting for almost all applications in our lives. In addition to the automotive sector, valuable fields of application exist for industry, for example, in the maritime, aviation, and energy sectors. Electronics are used in all these scenarios. Their proper functioning is essential for efficient operation or cooperation between man and machine, and is relevant to safety.

Electronics are trustworthy if they are “healthy”, meaning functional. How can the health status of electronics be measured, so that we can have even greater confidence in their safety and reliability in the future?

As a research institute, Fraunhofer ENAS has many years of experience in determining the lifetime of micro- and nanosystems, which we contributed to the “Trust-E” project. Based on this expertise, we developed smart physics-based models in the project, which map the physical behavior of electronic components, describe their aging behaviour, and can thus precisely predict their lifetime and state of health in real-time. These models depict the electrical, thermal, and mechanical behavior. This means that during electrical operation, part of the energy always enters the system as thermal loss, resulting in heat generation that can lead to thermo-mechanical stress on the system. This stress in turn leads to material fatigue, cracks, and fractures, which can result in the functional failure of individual components or the entire system.

What makes the early warning models developed by us special is that they work ultra-fast and also take physical processes into account. We were able to reduce their calculation time from several days to a few seconds, compared to established numerical lifetime models. We were also able to reduce their data size from several gigabytes to just a few kilobytes. This enables us to transfer our models from large computing clusters to extremely small microcontrollers, allowing them to be used in close proximity to the smallest electronic components. The health status of the system can therefore be recorded directly “on the edge” and continuously evaluated. In terms of road traffic, this would make breakdowns on country roads a thing of the past.

Thank you very much, Mr. Albrecht, for this interview.

Publications:

T. D. Horn, J. Albrecht, and S. Rzepka, Influence of Reducing the Load Level of Mission Profiles on the Remaining Useful Life of a TO220 Analyzed with a Surrogate Model, PHME_CONF, vol. 8, no. 1, p. 6, Jun. 2024.

J. Albrecht, T. Horn, S. Habenicht and S. Rzepka, Mission Profile related Design for Reliability for Power Electronics based on Finite Element Simulation, 2023 IEEE 25th Electronics Packaging Technology Conference (EPTC), Singapore, 2023, pp. 722-726.

The “Trust-E” project was carried out with the support of the EUREKA programs “PENTA” and “EURIPIDES”. The German partners were funded by the Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) under funding code 16ME0320K-16ME0329.

If you would like to learn more about reliability assessment methods in the field of electronics at Fraunhofer ENAS, further information is available here.