Degradation analysis of nano-contamination in plasma display panels

As an alternative to traditional life testing, degradation tests can be effective in assessing product reliability when measurements of degradation leading to failure can be observed. This article proposes a new model to describe the nonlinear degradation paths caused by nano-contamination in plasma display panels (PDP): a bi-exponential model with random coefficients. A likelihood ratio test was sequentially executed to select random effects in the nonlinear model. Analysis results indicate that the reliability estimation can be improved substantially by using the nonlinear random-coefficients model to incorporate both inherent degradation characteristics, and contamination effects of impurities for PDP degradation paths.