Design for manufacturing is an important aspect of the design life cycle. Besides the functional implementation of a product we will also take a closer look at the manufacturability and testability of the product. Production test tooling is an important factor.
A functional test system, or Production Test System (PTS) is often considered to reach the desired testability level. Depending on the anual production volumes, a functional PTS is often an investment which will pay off quickly. Other options for testing are the usage of Automatic Optical Inspection (AOI), flying probe testing, or boundary scan.
For a functional PTS a bed-of-nails is used. The test nails interface towards testpads on the printed circuit board assembly. These testnails will be interfaced towards the test hardware, which can either be off the shelf (e.g. a module from National Instruments) or dedicated hardware.
To control the needed test steps, we make use of National Instruments Teststand. This tool enables us to define the test sequences, pass/fail criteria and registration of the test results in a database.
An example of a functional PTS designed by Confed Solutions is shown below. The testfixture for this PTS was delivered by our partner MG products.
