October 31, 2005, Novi, Michigan. Hanse exhibited its latest Highly Accelerated Life Test (HALT) and Highly Accelerated Stress Screening (HASS) systems at the Auto Test Expo 2005 in Novi, Michigan, USA. The HALT tests are used for rapid product development of robust and reliable products. The HASS screens are used during production to find potential failures from weak parts, workmanship, or process problems. The systems are widely used in the automotive field as well as the in the electronic manufacturing industries.

The systems featured the latest 100 Grms six-degree-of-freedom (6DoF) vibration systems.(US Patent Pending) that doubles the Grms over that of the current standard of 50 Grms. This breakthrough allows more product payloads to be tested and cuts air consumption by 50%. The vibration which is unconditionally guaranteed for 3 years is combined with fast thermal cycling up to 70^oC per minute over a range of -100 to +200 ^oC.

It was explained to the Expo’s attendees the short lifecycle of today’s electronic products creates pressures for rapid development and manufacturer of new products or product upgrades in order to stay ahead in the competitive market place. For instance, the short model life of computers and printers is a good example. A new model appears every few months. Time-to-market is short, and customers expect the new models to work "out of the box" each and every time.

These pressures can result in compromised product development and/or manufacturing problems caused by part, process, and workmanship defects. The result is increased manufacturing costs, warranty costs, impacted profit margins, and worse, customer dissatisfaction with resulting loss of market share.

The HALT test is utilized during product development to determine initial weakness in the product by increasing stress level in steps to the component destruct levels and replacing weak components with more rugged ones thereby increasing product reliability.

The HASS process is a production screen to assure that weak components are precipitated (failed). HALT experience and the step stress empirical evaluation is used to establish a good screen. It is important that the level of stress is tailored to the product. There is no one stress fits all. Further the product must be functional tested while undergoing stress to detect failures and intermittents.