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Designing for Reliability

Reliability may have a seemingly straightforward definition — the consistency of a product performing to expectation over its lifecycle — but in practice, reliability is much more complex. After all, consistency, expectations and lifecycle all vary significantly across industries, applications and even the same types of devices.

With design cycles shrinking and device complexity growing, how can design engineers meet business and customer requirements without sacrificing reliability? A global Molex survey explored these questions and more to gather insights about designing for reliability.  

Overview

The perceived reliability of a company’s products is a leading factor in brand loyalty but poses a complicated challenge to design engineers. Driven heavily by the internet of things (IoT), electronic devices are going through a simultaneous evolution in connectivity and complexity, and tradeoffs in cost, size, manufacturability and other considerations can prove devastating for the long-term reliability of a product. 

Efforts to protect reliability are further complicated by the threats of a retiring workforce and the resulting loss of expertise, alongside potential opportunities from emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced simulations. Now more than ever, companies need to supplement their team with reliability resources that can help navigate the pitfalls and protect not only brand and product reputations but the continued adoption of new technologies.   

Explore the challenges to, solutions for, and innovations in reliability — including assessment and validation methodologies, standards and certifications, new predictive tools and the importance of trusted suppliers like Molex.

Featured Resources

SURVEY REPORT

Reliability and Hardware Design: A Survey of System Architects and Design Engineers

Reliability is recognized as critical to maintaining customers yet often faces downward pressures from design compromises, delayed planning and shortening test windows. Longstanding experience in designing for reliability is important in understanding and addressing these complexities but is now at risk due to employee turnover. It’s clear — product reliability is at a turning point. What’s next?

We surveyed 756 system architects and design engineers across the globe to better understand their challenges when designing for reliability and to glean their predictions for the future.

View Survey Report At a Glance Highlights

Five Considerations for Designing Reliable Devices

While designers are facing an abundance of seemingly conflicting business requirements and customer expectations, reliability doesn’t need to be sacrificed in order to achieve other goals. We’ve compiled the five criteria that engineers often prioritize and the innovations protecting long-term reliability. From predictive engineering to adopting components from other industries, here are a few practical takeaways.  

Get Reliability Design Tips

EBOOK

The Reliability Run-Down

With growing customer expectations for smaller, more powerful devices, delivering reliable performance becomes more complex. 

This eBook explores how design engineers across industries are balancing product performance, business requirements and reliability, while breaking down key insights gained from our Reliability and Hardware Design Survey. 

Explore the Reliability Run-Down
ebook

Blog

Pushed to the Limit: Accelerated Life Testing is Key to Data Center Reliability

For data center equipment that’s intended to continuously operate for years to come, accelerating the testing process is critical to determining long-term reliability. But traditional accelerated life testing (ALT) is not yet established for liquid immersion cooling. Explore the most common ALT methods and standards along with how organizations like OCP are addressing liquid environments. 

Read the Blog

Blog

How Grid Reliability Challenges are Accelerating Innovation in Energy Management

Outdated and unreliable power grids are driving the need for grid modernization. Thankfully, new smart grid technologies offer a reliable path to achieving dependable power distribution. 

Learn How

Blog

On the Road to Reliability: How Test-to-Failure is Ensuring Long-Term Performance

In a world of increasingly complex vehicles, testing components to generic specifications may no longer accurately reflect real-world use cases. How does test-to-failure help ensure components perform reliably when and where they’re needed most?    

Read the Blog

Blog

Building a Quality Culture to Improve Healthcare Manufacturing

While reliability is a key requirement across industries, healthcare manufacturing translates this requirement to an emphasis on quality. Industry standards, certifications and registrations define the bare minimum for patient expectations of medical devices. But our commitment to quality is deeply embedded in everything we do.   

Explore Our Quality Commitment
TL

Global Reliability Lab

With brand reputation on the line and so many factors influencing product reliability, there is always risk involved in bringing a next-generation product to market. The Molex Global Reliability Lab was developed to help mitigate that risk. 

Through process integrity and decades-strong engineering expertise, our in-house team ensures reliability from the start of product development, optimizing product designs and preventing surprise rework and excess costs.

Explore the Lab

Engineering Expertise

According to our reliability survey, 91% of design engineers agree that trusted and proven suppliers are essential to providing reliable products. At Molex, we don’t take this responsibility lightly.  

We have spent decades building engineering expertise into every stage of the product lifecycle. Our industry-leading global engineering capabilities and portfolio of interconnect solutions ensure our customers see their products through from idea to realization. 

Design with Expertise

Case Study

Pile Dynamics and Molex Team Up to Transform Quality Testing of Structural Foundations

Improved product quality, faster time-to-market and reliable supply chain management ensure global access to world’s leading dynamic foundation testing solutions.

Read the Case Study
George P.
"To us, Molex is more than a vendor. They’re an integral part of our business, bringing solutions to the table we really value and delivering them not only on time, but often ahead of schedule.”
George Piscsalko
CEO
Pile Dynamics, Inc.

Additional Resources

BLOG

The Key to Ensuring Data Center Accuracy and Performance

Developments in cloud computing, the Internet of Things, and the proliferation of mobile devices in everyday technology have all made innovative, highly efficient data centers more necessary than ever. Ensuring that today’s increasingly complex data centers are agile, adaptable, distributed, efficient and intelligent is a challenge for the ages.

Read the Blog

Blog

Ensuring Electromagnetic Compatibility

As the world grows more connected and the density of electronic components within products increases, EMI is a significant threat for design engineers to address. Our team of iNARTE-certified test engineers combine expertise in EMC design, analysis and testing with a state-of-the-art EMC test lab and simulation tools to ensure compliance in even the most highly regulated industries such as automotive, aerospace and medical.  

Tackle EMI

Blog

Investing in All Star Engineering Teams

In a landscape of ever-evolving design processes, heightened customer expectations and shrinking design cycles, it has never been more important to build first-class design engineering teams and invest in their success. See what our Design Engineer Tell-All survey had to say about opportunities, obstacles and needs. 

Read the Insights