Testing outside the box

The greatest challenge to those of us involved in electronics manufacturing and test has not changed in decades. Our job is to get products out the door so they work when they reach customers. As always, however, the pace of product development outstrips tester advancement. The solution lies in taking a more "top-down" approach, developing an effective overall test strategy that detects every possible fault type without looking for every fault at every step. Such a strategy increasingly includes steps that lie outside the traditionally narrow definition of "test." Many companies regard inspection as part of the manufacturing operation, rather than as a test activity. As optical, infrared, and x-ray inspection continue to supplement more conventional test approaches, however, maintaining such divisions becomes counterproductive.

Fortunately, dawn is breaking. Agilent Technologies' (www.agilent.com) promotion of the concept of "intelligent test" and Teradyne's (www.teradyne.com) Design-to-Build and other software products address these issues directly.

Opens and shorts represent faults that an inspection step can find, eliminating the need to look for them again at subsequent electrical-test steps. Courtesy of Teradyne.

Eliminating faults at the process level improves first-pass yields, thereby lowering overall manufacturing costs. It also reduces the throughput burden on test operations, since there is no need to look for those same faults downstream.

Similarly, Teradyne's Design-to-Build (D2B) software provides a modular environment that streamlines the flow of product information throughout the design-to-manufacturing cycle. It eliminates unnecessary data transfer and data manipulation steps and allows customers to develop comprehensive "test" strategies on a PC.

D2B also offers distributed test-management across a company's entire range of test and inspection platforms. Again, the goal is to allow OEMs and CMs alike to reduce the cost of manufacturing and test development and to permit companies to bring products to market more quickly.

These two ATE giants are by no means alone. In every corner of the industry, companies are linking manufacturing, inspection, and test into a coherent unit. Manufacturers that do not make equipment for all test and inspection steps themselves are forming alliances to gain access to complementary capabilities.

The customers reap the benefits. Let the harvesting begin!

Steve Scheiber, Contributing Technical Editor, sscheiber@aol.com