System reliability

Modern systems can achieve high reliability cost effectively by selecting components from high quality commercial production lines and by designing circuits to be fault tolerant. Experience gained at British Telecommunications and also by AMSAT shows that this practical approach is more realistic than the outdated prescriptive approach to reliability specification which has not kept up with the developments of high quality and advanced functional products in mainstream applications. The analysis of system life cycle costs shows that the right choices in design and technology must be made at the design and feasibility stage. The outcome is whole-life cost-effectiveness.