Embedded Systems Production Test

Electronic manufacturers feel enormous pressure to reduce the effort and cost of creating hardware tests and providing a test environment for reliable volume production. Manufacturing departments work in an environment where a large number of boards are designed and there is an unrelenting stream of new hardware in need of thorough and automated verification.

It Starts With Engineering

The most efficient approach in developing a manufacturing test program is to leverage the tools / tests used to originally verify the design correctness and reliability by the engineering team.  A robust design verification and test solution should be able to span the engineering and production domains.  The manufacturing engineer starts with a robust functional test library and a test platform that is flexible and extensible for special requirements. This approach will not only save time in test program development but insures a high level of quality based on test coverage.

Easy Test Flow Integration

Another requirement is the ability to integrate with the existing test equipment to control the test sequence and record the test results.  Depending on the test strategy, multiple tests can be run at one station or each station can be dedicated to a particular test. Communication with the Device Under Test ( DUT) can be via a serial port, USB or Ethernet. Test executive software such as National Instruments TestStand can run the tests and record the results. Given that this is a multi-domain solution ( engineering and production ) powerful debug capabilities will also be available to the manufacturing engineer for test failures.

Test Optimization for Faster Test Time and Coverage

The manufacturing engineer will have the entire functional test platform at his/her disposal to optimize the test sequence  for a time versus coverage trade-off.  The number of tests and the test parameters can be tuned for the desired result.  For instance, engineering may have used 9 different memory tests during the design verification process.  The manufacturing engineer may choose to only run a 5 in order to save time but still maintain a high confidence in the result.  The manufacturing engineer is also free to expand the test coverage by creating new tests or modifying existing tests.

Display System Test Video

Benefits

• Save time by leveraging the test platform used by the engineering team
• Utilize the same high-integrity high-coverage testing used for prototype verification
• Easily create new tests for special manufacturing requirements
• Optimize existing tests for time and coverage requirements
• Ability to transfer test and best practices knowledge between new products and projects
• Fast fault isolation and debugging of low-level signaling and high-level functions at the board and system level
• Control over the test parameters and environment variables without recompiling, significantly reducing debugging time
• Provides accurate record keeping or integrates into test systems