In semiconductor, telecommunication and other technology- driven industries, the requirements of highly-reliable products render traditional reliability methods obsolete due to the shrink of the design cycle. The situation becomes more challenging as these industries are shifting to the distributed manufacturing paradigm. The distributed manufacturing paradigm is built upon a pipeline, where the customer demands pushes the design, the design drives the manufacturing, and the manufacturing further pushes the final shipment. Given such a compressed design cycle, it is almost impossible for equipment manufacturers to implement extended in-house reliability growth testing. While the new paradigm may shrink the design cycle and reduce the manufacturing cost, if not properly managed, the man- ufacturer may incur escalated warranty costs and receive excessive customer complaints due to the poor product reliability. Eventually it may result in the long term damage to the market share and the credibility. Fig. 1 depicts the life cycle of automatic test equipment (ATE) from the design to the field deployment in the distributed manufacturing paradigm. ATE is a high-end electronics system widely used for testing wafers and devices in semiconductor industry.