Burn-in is an engineering method for screening out products containing reliability defects which would cause early failures in field operation. Previously, various burn-in models have been proposed mainly focused on the trade-off of shop repair cost and warranty cost ignoring manufacturing yield. From the view point of a manufacturer, however, burn-in decreases warranty cost at the expense of yield reduction. In this paper, we provide a general model quantifying a trade-off between product yield and reliability, in which any defect distribution from previous yield models can be used. A profit function is expressed in burn-in environments for determining an optimal burn-in time. Finally, the method is illustrated with gate oxide failures which is an important reliability concerns for VLSI CMOS circuits.