infant mortality

n. It is common lore among hackers (and in the electronics industry at
large; this term is possibly techspeak by now) 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 ). See bathtub curve , burn-in period.

