Editing Digital electronics (section)

====Reliability====

Another major motive for reducing component count on printed circuit boards is to reduce the manufacturing defect rate due to failed soldered connections and increase reliability. Defect and failure rates tend to increase along with the total number of component pins.

The failure of a single logic gate may cause a digital machine to fail. Where additional reliability is required, redundant logic can be provided. Redundancy adds cost and power consumption over a non-redundant system.

The ''reliability'' of a logic gate can be described by its [[mean time between failure]] (MTBF). Digital machines first became useful when the MTBF for a switch increased above a few hundred hours. Even so, many of these machines had complex, well-rehearsed repair procedures, and would be nonfunctional for hours because a tube burned-out, or a moth got stuck in a relay. Modern transistorized integrated circuit logic gates have MTBFs greater than 82 billion hours ({{val|8.2|e=10|u=hours}}).<ref>MIL-HDBK-217F notice 2, section 5.3, for 100,000 gate 0.8 micrometre CMOS commercial ICs at 40C; failure rates in 2010 are better, because line sizes have decreased to 0.045 micrometres, and fewer off-chip connections are needed per gate.</ref> This level of reliability is required because integrated circuits have so many logic gates.