Canaries Development via Combinatorial Materials Science Techniques for Prognostics and Health Management in Electronics Systems

The design of a canary in a system aims at the detection of failures without causing an error in the system. The idea behind a canary is to have a system that will provide an early warning in a way that a fault-tolerant system will continue its intended function despite the potential presence of hardware errors. This paper presents methods to collect and analyze life-cycle environmental and usage data for in-situ health assessments. The FARM method is also provided to develop a canary life cycle monitoring plan, that encompasses the selection of environmental and usage parameters. The multidimensional failure space of a system is analyzed with combinatorial material science. A case study is presented to illustrate the methodology.