Board test—time for a change?
An exclusive interview with a technical leader.
Rick Nelson -- Test & Measurement World, 4/1/2005
CheckSum has been in the board-test business for 17 years. In a discussion with Rick Nelson, Test & Measurement World's chief editor, the president and CEO John VanNewkirk—a newcomer to the industry—took a fresh look at board test.
| Are North American manufacturers wasting $250 million annually? Read VanNewkirk’s answer plus more on ISP in the continuation of this interview. |
VanNewkirk: In board design, it's the increasing use of ISP devices such as embedded microcontrollers, serial Flash, and FPGAs on just about every type of board. In board manufacturing, it's the growing popularity of multiboard panels, especially for today's handheld products. In test, it's the enormous economic impact created by a significant shift of the fault spectrum compared to just a few years ago.
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John VanNewkirk John VanNewkirk led the acquisition of CheckSum by investor group Teton Industries in 2003. Earlier, he led a successful turnaround of a steel service center in southern China for Van Shung Chong Holdings (VSC). Prior to joining VSC, VanNewkirk served as a management consultant with Bain & Co. in Hong Kong and San Francisco. While at Bain, VanNewkirk developed growth strategies for Fortune 500 companies. His experience included cost reduction, process reengineering, new market development, distribution strategy and implementation, and corporate strategy. VanNewkirk has a BS (Honors) from Brown University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. |
T&MW: How do more ISP chips on boards affect test?
VanNewkirk: ISP devices allow rapid, highly customized circuit designs and can store board-specific information like serial number, manufacturing date, and calibration data. This information must be programmed somewhere. Traditionally, it's been done off-board. We believe ISP programming at in-circuit will become more widely practiced when it's easier and less expensive to implement. That's the idea behind our new MultiWriter ISP product.
T&MW: What's the impact on test of the increasing numbers of panelized boards now being designed and built?
VanNewkirk: Multi-board panels with ISP devices on them can present a real production bottleneck if each ISP has to be programmed one at a time. MultiWriter is the first in-circuit-based ISP programmer that can program in parallel—up to 24 ISP devices at a time. That's obviously a benefit in high-throughput production environments.
T&MW: What do you mean by the "fault spectrum shift?"
VanNewkirk: Manufacturing yields at final test are much higher than they were just five years ago. However, the typical distribution of fault classes during circuit-board assembly has shifted during the same period. For example, the predominance of SMT means that solder defects are more likely to be quality related, such as cold joints, rather than outright shorts or opens, and opens are more likely than the shorts we saw with through-hole. Also, the overall component quality has increased dramatically, especially for digital ICs.
T&MW: So, what's been the impact of the fault spectrum shift on board test?
VanNewkirk: There's a major mismatch between the faults that are actually occurring in today's circuit-board manufacturing environments and the capabilities of the installed base of testers—what we call "big iron" or "traditional" in-circuit testers: the Agilents, GenRads, and Teradynes that are out there. The problem isn't that these testers lack the ability to deal with today's denser, more complex boards. Instead, it's that they have too much capability—and the high cost overhead that goes along with it.
T&MW: What's the problem with using "big iron" testers to do comparatively simple tests? They're already installed and usually have plenty of available capacity.
VanNewkirk: Like an expensive sports car with lots of reserve horsepower under the hood that is rarely used, excess tester capability means higher costs—even for simple test jobs. Bed-of-nails fixtures, test generation, and debugging are still expensive. For example, a tester with a multiplexed architecture adds fixture and program cost even for the simplest test jobs. More complex tester electronics also means higher operating and support costs—even when the tester itself is available and "free."
Click here to read the continuation of this interview.
