Standardized testers handle automotive PCB challenges

Greg Reed, Contributing Technical Editor -- Test & Measurement World, 3/9/2007 2:01:00 PM

Alfautomazione, headquartered in Lissone, Italy, supplies board test and inspection systems to manufacturers in several industries, including the automotive industry. I recently asked Luca Martinotti, sales and marketing manager of the company's ATE division, to discuss the test and inspection challenges that engineers encounter in automotive applications.

Q: What do you perceive to be uniquely challenging about testing automotive systems?

A: One of the challenges in the automotive test area is the need to standardize the test equipment across a wide range of products to reduce cost of test. The most common approach in the functional test area is to use a customized design for the equipment, incurring unnecessary design efforts and high prototyping start-up costs and delays.

An alternative is to develop test platforms dedicated to specific product functions with limited customization. Offering system platforms rather than dedicated system integration to a wide range of possible users has positive benefits, not only in terms of equipment costs, but also in the methodology to develop and produce the equipment. This ensures reliability and constant innovation of the proposed solution.

Q: What are some evolving trends and innovative solutions within printed-circuit board inspection and test?

A: In the automotive industry, the content of engine control units (ECUs) is increasing at a rate of 10% per year, and this trend will continue for the foreseeable future. After the semiconductor and circuit board test, these devices need to be simulated and functionally tested as if they were in an automotive environment.

Communication buses are getting faster and microprocessor/microcontroller content is getting higher. This will require a more complex test environment while keeping the cost of test down.

Automotive devices and electronics are becoming more complex and dense in design. The lack of internal node test access becomes one reason why functional testing is coming back to be a major key factor in keeping production quality costs down and quality yield as high as possible.

Automotive industry products also are evolving in different directions depending on the area of application, thus differentiating the test needs. Test requirements for powertrain devices are uniquely different from those for testing instrument clusters, which in turn are unique from those for telematic and multimedia devices. A test company must engage the marketplace with dedicated and skilled resources on all these different automotive segments.

Q: How can test providers best meet the cost of test vs. full test coverage dilemma?

A: To keep test costs down, custom solutions have to be replaced with standardized test solutions that can be repeated over a wider range of products with faster changeover from one product to another. This does not mean the test coverage will have to be compromised, because the equipment costs get amortized over a wider range of products.

Q: What tips can you offer users on data and image acquisition?

A: If we look to the off-the-shelf spectrum of solutions, we see that the market is continuously evolving from a hardware standpoint. This state-of-art hardware should be efficiently exploited in the test design phase with a high-end software environment that allows the final user to easily access these resources. Successful test providers have developed a vast set of software toolkits for signal management and image processing, and often these tools are dedicated to the specific functional test tasks.

Furthermore, test providers have developed measurement and processing hardware directly on the FPGA platform, both for data acquisition and image acquisition, with the target of increasing the level of integration. This will make the reconfiguration easier and improve test speed. Another important factor is good signal conditioning of hardware designs, which is often a key element to effectively using measurement resources.

Q: Looking to future test issues for automotive applications, how do test and measurement systems continue to add value?

A: Test and measurement equipment will continually add value because automotive components will always need to be functionally tested prior to full encapsulation. If not, costs go up exponentially when failures are discovered after the parts are installed in the automobile.

As mentioned earlier, due to the increasing density of automotive product design, the functional stage has been targeted to detect even such faults that historically were the domain of manufacturing defect screening systems. Today, the real added value of a functional test is not only to guarantee the product meets its specifications when leaving the factory, but also to help keep the manufacturing line and process fine tuned.

Q: Any final thoughts on automotive test and measurement systems?

A: Automotive test and measurement systems, especially in the end-of-line functional applications, will demand the test supplier be able to handle sophisticated test technologies at a competitive overall cost. Additionally, the test provider must support these high-level test contents worldwide as demanded by the end user.