A product for every taste

Steve Scheiber, Technical Editor -- Test & Measurement World, 5/1/2006

The electronics industry has forever changed Henry Ford's product concept of "any color as long as it's black" to a level of customization that not long ago would have seemed impossible. Today's PCs, entertainment systems, automobiles, and so on form but the scaffolding that provides a common structure for flexible electronic performance. By modifying or replacing ASICs, programmable devices, firmware, and software, it is possible to configure a system to address even the narrowest applications.

This paradigm shift pushes quality operations ever further into inspection as a technique of choice. In many cases, manufacturing volumes of identical products prove insufficient to amortize the cost of developing a comprehensive functional test. Inspection, on the other hand, examines only physical characteristics that remain relatively constant. By reading onboard codes, inspection can also ensure that installed programmable devices match the specified version more easily than a test can.

Still, even if inspection can cope with variation to cull bad products from good, you must still keep track of a product's different flavors to be sure you have made enough (and not too many) of each configuration and shipped them to the right locations. These "peripheral" activities often spell the difference between a successful operation and an unprofitable one.