Production test strategy for fast fault detection and correction
For over 20 years HUNT ENGINEERING performed their own electronic production, to best be able to control the scheduling and quality of the products.
We discovered that good visual inspection was the crucial first step for quality control, ensuring not only that a product would pass production tests now, but would also be operating reliably after 10s of years.
The final test is to run a functional test on the product that is similar to the things that a customer will expect the product to do.
The problem is that a functional test that operates all of the hardware features in all of their modes is very difficult to achieve, and even if you do achieve it, a faulty board will often fail in a way that produced little or no information about the cause of the failure.
At HUNT ENGINEERING we looked at and tried out a commercially available JTAG test tool. Although this had its uses, we found that it did not solve all of our problems, so we embarked on a project that went one step further.
This project resulted in a production test for our HAWK products that could detect short and open circuits on our boards, and also detect if a pull up or pull down was missing or a wrong value. This software meant that production test could exhaustively test newly produced boards for production issues, and could identify the exact connection on that board that had a problem and also what that problem was.
It is best if the production test is considered as part of a Design for Manufacture and test exercise, but even if that has not been done, I can help you to define and perhaps to develop an effective production test strategy.
It could be that the test I developed for the HAWK products could also be applicable to your products, and we can discuss licensing of that technology or contracts to develop specific tests.
As with everything I can offer, I can work on this alone, generating a complete test specification and perhaps tools, or I can work with your team in an advisory or mentoring capacity.
Contact me to discuss your needs free of charge. If my consulting to you can benefit us both then we can proceed from there.