http://www.dscc.dla.mil/Downloads/MilSpec/Doc...Life tests conducted within rated operating conditions should be conducted for a sufficiently long test period to assure that results are not characteristic of early failures or "infant mortality," and periodic observations of results should be made prior to the end of the life test to provide an indication of any significant variation of failure rate with time.
http://foldoc.org/?infant+mortalityinfant mortality
It is common lore among hackers (and in the electronics industry at large) that the chances of sudden hardware failure drop off exponentially with a machine's time since first use (that is, until the relatively distant time at which enough mechanical wear in I/O devices and thermal-cycling stress in components has accumulated for the machine to start going senile). Up to half of all chip and wire failures happen within a new system's first few weeks; such failures are often referred to as "infant mortality" problems (or, occasionally, as "sudden infant death syndrome").
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/7197670.html Methods and apparatuses for reducing
infant mortality in semiconductor devices utilizing static random access memory (SRAM)
Document Type and Number: United States Patent 7197670
Abstract:
In accordance with various embodiments of the present invention, a cache-equipped semi-conductor device is provided with enhanced error detection logic to detect a first location-independent error within an area of the cache memory and prevent further use of the area if the error is determined to be the second consecutive error associated with a common area.
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1098163Disk Infant Mortality in Large Storage SystemsFull text Full text available on the Publisher sitePublisher Site
Source MASCOTS archive
Proceedings of the 13th IEEE International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems table of contents
Pages: 125 - 134
Year of Publication: 2005
ISBN ~ ISSN:1526-7539 , 0-7695-2458-3