Mass production is the next step that takes place after the prototype is certified and gone through a field trial. The customer is always conscious of the quality of the product. In a typical HW board design, there will be hundreds of components and it might have multiple PCB HW connected with each other. In high-speed design, most of the components are assembled by machine but some odd components and connectors may need to be done manually. Even after numerous quality inspections, there is always a possibility that one or more product functions will have problems. Some of the frequent issues observed are improper reflow configurations, dry soldering, component mounted with incorrect orientation, components missed out to populate, component damage due to excess heating, component shelf life is over and component batch has manufactured issues.
To avoid such issues and have better quality assurance, it is required to perform sanity checks at the functionality level and at the HW signal level. Most of the HW PCBs have the provision of test points on the PCB which helps to perform such test. If the QC person performs this testing manually then it will take significant time and cost. Automation is needed to assist functional testing and signal testing incorporated into a manufacturing assembly line in order to increase test efficiency and production yield. We help our customers to design and develop a test Bed Of Nails (BON) which is a specially designed PCB having lots of pogo pins placed in such a way that it can touch the test points of the PCB. The test bed of nail (BON) is placed in a special mechanical assembly having a plunger mechanism to make sure that there is no loose contact once HW PCB under test is placed in mark up area. This fixture will include buttons, LED, LCD, and other indicators built in that aid start the test and shows the test’s outcome.
Test jig setup always consists of HW, SW and mechanical assembly. We help our customers to provide turnkey solutions under one roof. In some of the complex setups, we also need to interface test bed setup with PC based test suite to exercise complex scenarios and also capture the log of execution. The PC also has other manufacturing utilities to flash the firmware and other configurations into the HW.
