David Nicholls, a key member of Quanterion’s staff over its first ten years will be very busy at this year’s International Reliability and Maintainability Symposium (RAMS) in San Jose, California presenting two technical papers and serving as an invited panelist. The RAMS is the largest international symposium of reliability, maintainability and quality engineering every year covering both government and industry topics.
Mr. Nicholls’ first paper "Development of Photonics Component Failure Rate Models" describes work he led sponsored by the Naval Air Systems Command through the Pennsylvania State University Electro-Optics Center to develop photonics component failure rate models. His second paper "Two Recommendations for the Acquisition and Growth of Reliable Systems" recommends new reliability assessment metrics to (1) evaluate the ability of competing suppliers to meet reliability requirements during the proposal phase of an acquisition and (2) evaluate results from reliability growth test activities to quantify and leverage lessons learned that will improve Design for Reliability (DFR) processes.
Recognizing his work in support of new Government/Industry reliability practice initiatives, Dave will be an invited participant in the panel discussion: "Appropriate and Practical Application Of Empirical, Handbook And Physics Of Failure Reliability Modeling Methods." The Panel session will focus the methods used for reliability predictions, including the uses and misuses of empirical, handbooks and Physics of Failure (PoF) models and methods as well as the future improvements to MIL-HDBK-217 “Reliability Prediction of Electronic Equipment,” including the potential inclusion of various new types of models. Other panel members include experts from the University of Maryland, Boeing Corp., DfR Solutions, Sandia National Labs, SolFocus, Ops a la Carte, and the Navy
