Acronym · Safety & Security
FMEA (Failure Mode and Effects Analysis)
A bottom-up, systematic review that lists how each part or function can fail, the local and system effects of each failure mode, and the existing controls. It ranks risk to drive design or process improvement.
- Also known as
- DFMEA, PFMEA
- Type
- Acronym
- Domain
- Safety & Security, Safety analysis
Notes
Originated in aerospace and military work long before automotive safety standards adopted it wholesale.
Overview
Failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) is a structured, bottom-up review of how each part, function or process step could fail, what the effects of each failure would be, and what controls exist, used to rank risks and decide what to improve. In the chip industry design FMEAs look at products and process FMEAs look at manufacturing steps, and both are standard evidence for automotive customers.
How it works
A team lists the items to analyse: blocks of a design, functions, or steps in a process flow. For each it lists the ways it can fail, the effect of each failure locally and on the whole system, the causes, and the prevention and detection controls already in place. Each failure is then rated, traditionally for severity, occurrence and detection, and the ratings are used to prioritise action. The AIAG and VDA FMEA Handbook, used widely in the automotive supply chain, sets out a seven-step approach and replaces the older risk priority number with an action priority rating.
Actions might be a design change, an extra test, a new process control or an inspection. The FMEA is a living document, revisited when designs, processes or field experience change.
IEC 60812 is the general international standard for planning, performing and documenting FMEA, including the criticality analysis variant, FMECA. For functional safety, chip suppliers also produce FMEDA, an extension that adds failure rates and the diagnostic coverage of safety mechanisms to calculate the hardware metrics ISO 26262 asks for.
Examples
- A process FMEA for a wire bonding step, leading to an extra pull test on each lot.
- A design FMEA for a voltage regulator block that adds an over-current monitor.
- An FMEDA for an automotive microcontroller giving the diagnostic coverage of each safety mechanism.
- Updating an FMEA after a customer return reveals a failure mode nobody had listed.
Why it matters
FMEA turns engineering judgement about risk into a reviewable record, and automotive customers expect to see design and process FMEAs as part of approval. Quality and reliability engineers, process engineers, safety analysis engineers and product engineers contribute, and FMEAs feed control plans, test strategies and safety cases.
In the chip lifecycle design FMEAs start during architecture and design, process FMEAs during process and package development and NPI, and both are updated through production as issues arise.
Related terms
Part of the Safety & Security glossary, with every term in the topic and the lifecycles, tools and standards that use them.
Where it appears on the Hub
Used on 44 pages of the Hub. In each group, the pages that mention it most come first.
Lifecycle stages and gates
Skills
Tools
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Last reviewed . Written by The Semiconductor Hub editorial team. The full glossary