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An Engineer's Guide to High Reliability Components 6 Moreover, COTS solutions offer advantages over discrete solutions with respect to product lifecycle and management. For a discrete solution containing many individual components, product and engineering teams will face significant challenges related to component obsolescence and sourcing. Though discrete solutions may appear to be the lower-cost option at the bill of materials (BOM) level, when BOM management and component sourcing are considered, COTS proves advantageous. By designing a system with high-reliability COTS components, engineers can easily ensure high levels of reliability in their end products in a way that discrete design would not allow. Apex Designs COTS for Reliability However, COTS solutions are not the same everywhere. For example, COTS solutions designed for consumer products might have lower reliability targets because the end device or system is not considered mission-critical or capital equipment. On the other hand, demanding applications in the defense and aerospace, high-reliability industrial, and medical market segments tend to require much higher reliability targets; these applications place a high value on maximizing operational uptime, ensuring uninterrupted system functionality, and improving operational equipment efficiency. Apex Microtechnology offers unique COTS solutions specifically developed for high-reliability applications. As a testament to its commitment to high reliability, the company maintains both ISO 9001 and MIL - PRF-38534 certifications and operates as a Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) DLA Class-H hybrid microcircuit manufacturing facility. Apex's COTS Process Underlying the reliability of Apex's COTS solutions is a stringent phase-gate design process. This process contains six phases encompassing the entirety of a product's lifecycle, beginning at ideation, and continuing through production release and into the product's market maturity. The first phase of the process, Phase-0, is product definition. In Phase-0, the Apex team defines customer needs and identifies major design, performance, and manufacturability risks so that proper considerations and mitigations are put into place. The next phase, Phase-1, is the conceptual design phase. During this phase, the initial design work begins, and the first measures for reliability are taken. The team considers the electrical design itself, the device packaging, the manufacturing processes required, and the approach for incorporating the device's electrical parametric test program into the process flow. At the end of each phase in the design process, the team reevaluates the product and decides whether to proceed or to stop the project until existing risks have been mitigated. In Phase-2, a large amount of intensive R&D occurs, with deep-dive efforts placed into each of the critical points— from circuit design, layout, and packaging to processing,