Kirk Gray

Kirk Gray has had many decades of experience in the electronics manufacturing industry. He began his career in electronics as a technician at an electronics calibration company in 1975. Soon after, he began working with semiconductor manufacturing equipment and progressed to system-level validation and reliability testing.

As a field engineer for Accelerators Inc. and Veeco Instruments from 1977 to 1982, he installed and serviced helium mass spectrometers (leak detection), Ion Implantation Systems, and many other thin-film, high-vacuum systems used in semiconductor fabrication. As a Sales Engineer for Veeco Instruments and CVC from 1982 through 1986, he worked with semiconductor process engineers to solve thin-film application and etching process issues, as well as equipment applications.

Starting in 1989, he worked closely with Gregg Hobbs, Ph.D., the inventor of the methods of Highly Accelerated Life or Limit Test (HALT) and Highly Accelerated Stress Screening (HASS), at Storage Technology and later QualMark, the environmental chamber company founded by Dr. Hobbs.

In 1994, he formed AcceleRel Engineering, Inc., a consulting company. He led a wide variety of electronic companies, including biomedical, telecommunications, power supply, and other electronic systems producers, in adopting HALT and HASS methods and rapidly improving the reliability of electronic and electromechanical hardware. He has been invited to China and Canada to teach and consult on HALT and HASS and the Physics-of-Failure (PoF) approach to reliability. Mr. Gray has helped plan and direct testing, developed test fixtures, optimized accelerated-stress-screen thermal cycling, analyzed test data, created written test reports, and advised design teams on component layout for robust assemblies. He also conducted failure analyses of assemblies and components to identify root causes. Mr. Gray has documented reduced warranty return rates from 5% to 0.5% after new HALT and HASS test processes were implemented. With this 90% reduction in warranty returns, reliability testing was reduced from 72 hours to one (1) hour.

He was a Senior Test Engineer at Dell for 7 years, starting in 2003, during which he created and implemented HASA for all Dell power supply vendors. He has been teaching, consulting, and applying HALT and HASS since 1992. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and is a Senior Life Member of the IEEE. He was a past Chairperson of the Denver Chapter of the IEEE Reliability Society and the IEEE/CPMT Technical Committee on Accelerated Stress Testing, and is a Senior Collaborator with the CALCE (Center for Advanced Life Cycle Engineering) Consortium at The University of Maryland. He is the owner and Principal Consultant at Accelerated Reliability Solutions, LLC