High Acceleration Life Test (HALT)
A high-acceleration life test (HALT) is used to enhance product reliability to improve product reliability in various industries, including electronics, aviation, medical, and military.
HALT testing is an important part of any new product development cycle. These tests quickly find weak links in the product by applying accelerated stress. The goal of HALT is to proactively identify weaker links in the product and fix them to make the product more reliable.
HALT is a "testing to fail" technique. It is generally performed at the early stage of product development to identify weaker links in the product. This test continues till the product fails. HALT doesn't tell us anything about the field's reliability value or failure probabilities.
Difference between ALT and HALT
Accelerated life tests (ALT) are used to determine how long products will continue to function properly before failure occurs. A high acceleration life test or HALT is used to find weak links in a product. In other words: ALT is used to measure reliability, and HALT is used to improve reliability.
The time taken to perform HALT is short as compared to ALT.
HALT is performed on relatively smaller sample size as compared to ALT.
ALT is a quantitative analysis, while HALT is a qualitative analysis.