Patent ID: 8290753

Claim:
A method of predicting time to failure of a metallic component of an electronic device, the method comprising: generating a finite element model of the component, wherein the finite element model comprises a plurality of nodes, and wherein a value of at least one stress variable is associated with each node of the plurality of nodes; defining at least one representative volume element for each node of the plurality of nodes; developing a microstructure-based failure model for each of the representative volume elements, wherein the microstructure-based failure model uses random initial values for one or more properties of a material microstructure within each of the representative volume elements, and wherein the microstructure-based failure model represents heterogeneous microstructures in the component, and comprises one or more cyclic fatigue models selected from a first group consisting of crack nucleation, short crack growth, and long crack growth models, and further comprises one or more time-dependent fatigue models selected from a second group consisting of crack nucleation, short crack growth, and long crack growth models; simulating failure of each node by applying the value of the at least one stress variable for that node to the microstructure-based failure model for each of the representative volume elements for that node, thereby calculating a predicted time to failure for each representative volume element; and calculating a time to failure for the component by choosing the shortest predicted time to failure for any node.