For 30 years the department Environmental & Reliability Engineering at Fraunhofer IZM has been researching, developing and consulting on the subject of environmentally compatible design and reliabilty of electronics and IT.
When developing and bringing new products to market, knowing its lifetime can be essential. Manufacturers want their products to work for a specific period of time or number of uses, but things break and products fail. To know when and why that happens, Fraunhofer IZM uses reliability testing.
An important challenge for society as a whole is to curb the increasing consumption of resources and limiting the amount of electrical waste. The inquiries from the industry, whether for design concepts for specific products or for environmental improvements to basic technologies, are currently increasing significantly.
As environmental experts for electronics and ICT products, Fraunhofer IZM works with partners from industry, research and politics to develop cost and environmental models, create holistic environmental life cycle assessments and devise strategies for reusing raw materials in high-tech products.
Even today, women remain underrepresented in science and in research-driven industry. At Fraunhofer IZM, women account for 29.3 % of all employees, with a greater proportion of women in non-scientific (50 %) than in science jobs (23.8 %).* To counter…
Mobility matters for people and their devices, but increasingly, so does sustainability. But smartphones, tablets, and the like generate considerable carbon emissions when they are produced and when they are used. In addition, valuable raw materials are used to make…
The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 stipulates that every nation enjoys free access to space. For the last 20 years, more and more nations have been launching commercial projects in space. Private spaceflight companies are planning to use micro and…
Communication networks like 5G need the many modules and components that make them up to be robust and long-lasting, whatever the environmental conditions or other circumstances may be. Researchers at Fraunhofer IZM have now developed a testing method which allows…
In electronics, batteries are always the weakest link. Many factors can influence how rechargeable batteries age. Their capacity is affected not just by the number of charging cycles, but also by environmental factors like temperature or by the behaviour of…
When developing and bringing new products to market, knowing its lifetime can be essential. Manufacturers want their products to work for a specific period of time or number of uses, but things break and products fail. To know when and…
Tom Dobs is an expert for the reliability of electronic systems at Fraunhofer IZM. In the video, he introduces different methods for testing and optimizing products concerning their reliability. Vibration measurement and test with electronic components, if required in combination…
Driven by the digital and ecological transition, the term “eco-reliability” has gained increased popularity within the last years. The main objective of this article is to present this new approach from its complementary perspectives “ecology and reliability” and to highlight…
Although life cycle assessments do not save the environment, it can make industry think, as the example of life cycle assessments for electronics shows. Every electronic product, useful as it may be, comes with a heavy ecological backpack: From the…
When we think of the journey of electronic products, most of us are probably thinking about the journey that our new washing machine takes from the shop and worrying about getting it up the stairs and into our flat. Very…
