  Maintaining the required performance of the CMS electromagnetic calorimeter
(ECAL) barrel at the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) requires
the replacement of the entire on-detector electronics. 12240 new very front end
(VFE) cards will amplify and digitize the signals of 62100 lead-tungstate
crystals instrumented with avalanche photodiodes. The VFE cards host five
channels of CATIA pre-amplifier ASICs followed by LiTE-DTU ASICs, which
digitize signals with 160MS/s and 12bit resolution. We present the strategy and
infrastructure developed for achieving the required reliability of less than
0.5% failing channels over the expected lifetime of 20 years. This includes the
choice of standards, design for reliability and manufacturing, as well as
factory acceptance tests, reception testing, environmental stress screening and
calibration of the VFE cards.
