Better, Safer, Cooler Electronics

How we help clients

• Batteries & Power

  Safer, more reliable, longer-lasting batteries and power systems are at the forefront of innovation in electronics. Our long history in failure analysis and reliability testing informs our unique approach to mitigating risk for all battery designs and form factors. We commonly identify causes of failure across: 

  • Design flaws
  • Incorrect battery selection
  • Electrical abuse
  • Mechanical abuse
  • Manufacturing defects

  Using our state-of-the-art labs, we study and understand the evolution of internal damage inside lithium-ion batteries over time. We can often link this progression to design and manufacturing issues, to identify scenarios that increase safety risk.

  Case study

  Making Hoverboards Safer

  Following incident reports that included battery packs sparking, smoking, catching fire, and even exploding, Exponent's clients asked for help determining the root cause of hoverboard failures and how to minimize the future risk.

  

• Big Data for User Interface & Artificial Intelligence

  Algorithm performance can drive product and technology differentiation in the marketplace — but perfecting it has been a challenge for many companies. In the real world, the diversity of people, conditions, and use cases presents an imposing hurdle, including ensuring your sensors can read data from all types of people and your algorithms are trained to interpret the real range of data you'll gather.

  Exponent has provided technology inclusivity consulting and helped advise design on dozens of products for the world's highest-profile product makers. 

  Additionally, our teams have traveled around the globe, collecting user data and product research from people on six continents to ensure biometrics algorithms are being trained and tested against the broadest sampling possible. Exponent data scientists create detailed requirements ahead of data collection to ensure proper statistical sampling. They also clean and organize the data before feeding it into machine-learning pipelines. 

  Case study

  How Do We Ensure Technology Doesn't Discriminate?

  Exponent's multidisciplinary teams build more inclusive technologies by capturing broad ethnographic data and performing extensive user experience analysis.

  

• Cameras & Optics

  Optimizing optical performance while ensuring system safety requires a multitude of design iterations throughout the product lifecycle. Exponent offers full product line risk, performance, and hazard assessments through simulations — as well as standardized and custom testing solutions.

  From critical laser safety issues to simple cosmetic defects, we illuminate solutions for complex optical physics applications, including: 

  • Virtual reality headsets
  • Facial-recognition illuminators
  • Autonomous vehicles

• Displays

  A primary challenge in display failure analysis is that failure often occurs at a physically separate location from its symptoms, with core issues typically residing in the complex circuitry that drives the display. Our methodical approach enables us to pinpoint and verify true causes across all product generations and ever-changing form factors. We commonly find issues in:

  • Bubbles
  • Contamination
  • Delamination
  • Glass fracture
  • Metal trace fracture
  • Thin film failures

• Electrical Circuits

  Diagnosing issues in circuits often requires knowledge on multiple scales: system to circuit and component to material. We leverage our deep understanding of engineering principles and interdisciplinary collaboration to drive quickly toward answers. Our broad experience in recreating failures and conducting reliability testing leads to the clear and correct answers you need, spanning traditional printed circuit boards (PCBs), contemporary microscale circuits, and intellectual property assessment.

  Industry Analysis

  Best Practices in Printed Circuit Board Assembly Manufacturing

  PCBAs are fundamental to almost every electronic device, from life-enabling smart phones to life-changing automotive integrations to life-sustaining medical devices. Composed of up to tens of thousands of soldered joints, just one faulty solder joint can cause a PCBA to fail. To prevent defects, manufacturers can build and assess quality early in the design phase to mitigate the many issues that affect performance.

  

• Scientific User Research

  All the innovative technology a company pours into its electronics may be negated if humans can't intuitively and safely use them.

  Exponent's highly credentialed user researchers help product design to be user-centric and data-driven, leveraging multidisciplinary teams with broad industry experience across human factors, cognitive and perceptual psychology, biomechanics, and data science.

  Our methodologies are custom tailored and scientifically rigorous, combining scientific tools, physiological measures, full-body motion capture, and other techniques to understand users' psychological and cognitive experiences during product use. We go beyond widely used, subjective, self-reported measures that tell only half the story to dive deeper into fully understanding users' behaviors and experiences.

  Our insights can be used to ensure products meet the needs of most users and account for unexpected use cases across diverse populations. Beyond the products themselves, usability testing includes ensuring instructions and warnings are easily understood, helping limit your product liability.

• Product Safety & Risk

  Discovering design flaws before they become costly problems requires an experienced perspective on the numerous ways things can go wrong. Exponent is a world leader in holistic failure analysis, specializing in novel failures produced by new technologies. We help solve evolving market challenges such as: 

  • Phones and wearables stay in contact with people's skin for prolonged periods of time, introducing new concerns about chemical reactions. We are innovators in the examination of chemical leaching, with unique processes for quantifying the risk a product poses in irritating a user's skin or causing other health issues. We can simulate leaching for a variety of use cases and perform toxicology studies to determine the expected impact to humans.  
  • Unique, novel product applications, including those involving laser optics, are becoming more frequent. Exponent has extensive experience studying lasers and their many uses, as well as heat sources and radio frequency radiation to identify safety risks. Our network of in-house testing facilities allows us to design custom testing procedures for your unique product requirements.
  • Along with the increased contact of electronics with the human body comes risks such as burns and other injuries. Get the expert guidance you need to identify possible issues before they become product recalls or lawsuits —  or limit challenges if they do arise.

  Case study

  How Can We Ensure Implantable Medical Devices Allow for Life-Saving Imaging?

  An active implanted medical device company needed help gaining MRI Conditional approval for their product and turned to Exponent for wide-ranging testing support to ensure its safety.

  

• Adhesion & Materials Science

  The right adhesive can make or break the functionality, safety, and reliability of an electronics end product. Combining surface science, mechanics, and materials science, we help clients control adhesion at critical interfaces. Common adhesion challenges arise because different parts of the supply chain are on either side of the interfacial bond.

  Materials selection accounting for reliability and field performance is critical. Our interdisciplinary teams ensure that both mechanical and chemical aspects of adhesion are understood. We are also able to perform custom measurements when coupon-level testing is unavailable.

• Simulation & Modeling

  Ensuring your design efforts are heading in the right direction can save electronics companies from painstaking expenses further down the product development line.

  During the concepting phase, our experts specialize in identifying the right bespoke modeling and prototype evaluation approaches. For example, our mechanical modeling techniques provide insights for products that are difficult or impractical to measure experimentally. We can help you gain the full scientific picture of the topic needed to push the product envelope.

• Manufacturing

  Executing on safe, efficient, and exacting manufacturing processes is mission-critical in the product lifecycle, especially for items produced at high volume, where even small errors quickly add up. Exponent's multidisciplinary teams can assess factory performance from every perspective, encompassing the building and machines, the humans around them, and the processes for making your products.

  Our assessments can include understanding the environmental impacts of your operations and products as well. Our environmental scientists can give you a clear understanding of how your activities may affect the air, soil, and water near your facilities and through your products.

  Case study

  How Can Manufacturing Safety Keep Pace with Technology?

  A major battery manufacturer setting up a new technology needed to understand how new processes would impact worker safety and turned to Exponent for a broad multifaceted assessment.

  

• Disputes

  Clients turn to Exponent when they need to objectively understand what went wrong and why. Whether you're navigating a patent dispute, breach of contract, or product liability claim, Exponent brings principled science to every case — telling you what you need to know, not what you want to hear.

  Exponent scientists and engineers represent the science at dispute proceedings by offering clarity, precision, and a knack for explaining complicated topics in understandable ways. 

  We can assist you across all phases of disputes, including pre-litigation, fact-finding, litigation expert testimony, and arbitration.