Broadening the temperature range in accelerated testing o f electronic products is a typical measure to assure that the product o f interest is sufficiently robust. At the same time, a too broad tem perature range can lead to the shift in the modes and mechanisms o f failure, i.e., result in failures that will not occur in actual opera tion conditions. Application o f mechanical prestressing o f the test specimen could be an effective means fo r narrowing the tempera ture range during accelerated testing and thereby achieving trust worthy and failure-mode-shift-free accelerated test information. Accordingly, simple engineering predictive models are developed for the evaluation o f the magnitude and the distribution o f thermal and mechanical stresses in a prestressed bow-free test specimen. A design, in which an electronic or a photonic package is bonded between two identical substrates, is considered. Such a design is of ten employed in some today's packaging systems, in which the "inner," functional, component containing active and/or passive devices and interconnects is placed between two identical "outer" components (substrates). The addressed stresses include normal stresses acting in the component cross sections and the interfacial shearing and peeling stresses. Although the specimen as a whole remains bow-free, the peeling stresses might be nevertheless appre ciable, since the outer components, if thin enough, deflect to a greater or lesser extent with respect to the inner component. The numerical example has indicated that the maxima o f the interfacial thermal shearing and peeling stresses are indeed comparable and that these maxima are on the same order o f magnitude as the nor mal thermal stresses acting in the components' cross sections. It is shown that since the thermal and the prestressing mechanical loads are o f different physical nature, the stresses caused by these two load categories are distributed differently over the specimen's length. It is shown also that although it is possible and even advisa ble to apply mechanical prestressing fo r a lower temperature range, it is impossible to reproduce the same stress distribution as in the case o f thermal loading. The obtained results enable one to shed light on the physics o f the state o f stress in prestressed bowfree test specimens in electronics and photonics engineering.