What is the lifetime expectancy of NRF52832 IC ?

[SaiTeja]

Hello , I would like to know lifetime expectancy of NRF52832 IC. By lifetime expectancy I mean the amount of duration before NRF52832 goes non-functional.
Please help me in this regard.

[Kenneth]

Failure in time (FIT, 60% CL): 36.

[SaiTeja]

Hello Kenneth, I am unable to understand your answer. Can you please elaborate

[Kenneth]

Snippet from https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/59774/what-are-fits-and-how-they-used-in-reliability-calculations 

"The term FIT (failure in time) is defined as a failure rate of 1 per billion hours. A component having a failure rate of 1 FIT is equivalent to having an MTBF of 1 billion hours."

So a value of 36 means a failure rate of 36 per billion hours.

[Kenneth]

I can also mention that the flash memory is specified to minimum 10years at 40degree Celcius, maybe that is the number you are looking for.

[SaiTeja]

Does this mean that NRF52832 IC will work as it is intended for 10 years? 

[Kenneth]

The short answer is Yes.

[DFreg]

Is this the lifetime of the memory hardware, or just the retention of data? If we are able to refresh the data before 10 years, will the flash memory continue to work properly?

[Kenneth]

In an ideal world I assume you could theoretically refresh the flash every 10 years, and you could do this for 20000times, and the product would last 200000years... but I don't think so, instead 10 years what you can expect for a consumer product that the chip is targetted for. 

[DFreg]

Thanks. We are designing a solar energy converter, and our target lifetime is 25 years. So are you saying the flash memory would likely not be reliable past 10 years, even if we were to refresh it periodically? Hopefully there is a workaround so that the flash isn't the limiting factor on using the NRF52832. I don't even know what a non-flash alternative would be. There must be some products that last more than 10 years that have flash memory.