Assessment of FIDES Reliability Prediction Methodology

Abstract

The FIDES Guide is a reliability prediction handbook published by a group of European defense and aerospace manufacturers under the supervision of the French Ministry of Defense. This paper evaluates the suitability of FIDES for predicting reliability based on the model used to calculate the failure rate, and the accuracy of its reliability predictions. The evaluation makes use of IEEE Standard 1413, titled, “IEEE Standard Framework for Reliability Prediction of Hardware.” The paper shows that FIDES is based on the erroneous assumption of a constant failure rate for electronics, and lacks key attributes (e.g., materials and geometry of components) required to make a prediction accurate or to be considered physics-of-failure based. FIDES predictions are not reproducible due to subjective factors, selection of which varies depending on who is making the prediction.