Testability for designers

Another aspect of their daily work is design validation and, in particular, testing prototypes, all within the time to market restrictions imposed by today’s accelerated product lifecycle: from concept, to design, to prototype, to production, to legacy repair.

Seica is where customers look for leading-edge solutions and at Electronica 2022 Booth A3-459 they will be highlighting innovative solutions aimed at providing facilitated, sustainable and, at the same time, powerful 'Testability for Designers'.

'Design for testability' is a well-known concept in the world of electronic board design, and it is one of the many requirements that design engineers have to deal with every day. Another aspect of their daily work is design validation and, in particular, testing prototypes, all within the time to market restrictions imposed by today’s accelerated product lifecycle – from concept, to design, to prototype, to production, to legacy repair.

Seica’s Pilot VX has an extensive suite of measurement hardware and software tools to enable the test and validation of prototypes quickly and with minimum effort. Testing low volumes is certainly the first thing that comes to mind when a flying prober is mentioned, even though the latest generation, which the Pilot VX represents, is now key in many high-volume production environments due to dramatic improvements in speed and performance. But Seica has added many capabilities and tools that specifically address the needs of designers when testing prototypes.

Having physical access to the circuit is a basic requirement for applying stimuli to a circuit and measuring the result. With the ability to probe even 35µm pads The PILOT VX enables precise physical access to even very small targets, and the powerful Flylab software allows you to 'interact' with your electronic board as if you had eight probes in your hand and a table of instruments available and ready to be used to perform validation testing, without requiring specific training on the tester or generating a test program.

Contact points can be selected manually using the integrated cameras and clicking on the graphical board image, then the simple and intuitive software interface enables the performance of parametric and functional measurements by simply selecting the type of measurement and entering the value. The system automatically positions the mobile probes and the measurement result appears on the integrated oscilloscope.

Moreover, the PR boost feature provides the capability to power the board (up to 2A per probe) with all of the eight standard electrical probes, to enable the test of active circuits and other functional tests which are an essential part of the design validation process. The Thermal Scan option is another useful validation tool, allowing the user to acquire a profile of the powered up board to check the thermal behavior of the various sections of the circuit.

Of course, SEICA’s VIVA software platform also includes a fast, streamlined process to automatically generate and debug a complete test program starting from the board CAD data, enabling the immediate test of the prototype board to detect any manufacturing errors.

Functional tests can be created simply, on the fly, with the powerful QuickTest software, with only the knowledge of the circuit to be tested (and not necessarily the tester or programming language).

The FlyPod option extends testing capability even more by specialising a single mobile probe to carry up to 10 channels, enabling access to boundary scan circuits and adding onboard programming capability without any external FIXED cables.

Designers often have to implement the original functional test spec, and Seica’s MINI Line of test solutions provide a wide range of integrated instruments, switching matrices and user power supplies, making it a very useful and cost-effective platform to develop your customised test benchmark. The user has broad discretion in the choice of configuration and programming languages: Seica’s VIVA Integrated Platform (VIP) allows simple integration of off-the shelf instrumentation, and test sequences can be developed using the VIVA Test Studio environment, or a wide range of third-party software including LabView, TestStand, C, and Python.

Unlike self-manufactured ‘rack and stack’ test beds, Seica’s MINI test solution, with its standard ‘core’ VIP including complete user documentation and a self-diagnostic program, guarantees its sustainability and maintainability over time and in the case of resource turnover. Plus, the programs developed on the MINI are completely transportable to other SEICA systems which makes for fast and simple setup of the manufacturing test process.

The PILOT and MINI test solutions (like all SEICA systems) include the features and performances to support full traceability of the test results of each single board, making them available for subsequent repair operations, statistical analysis, etc., storing them locally via the resident repair station software module, or on external information systems.

The Pilot VX adds even more information, since it includes the capability to collect and store the data regarding the mechanical pressure applied by the test probes on every point on the board under test, making it available for visual, graphical and statistical analysis.

The acquisition and digitalisation of additional data coming from machines is part of Canavisia’s Industry 4.0 solution, and visitors to SEICA’s booth will see the Dashboard and APP provide a real-time view of the connected resources as well as statistical reporting.

Come and visit SEICA’S booth at electronica 2022 to see a wide range of solutions, developed to help validate prototypes, with minimum effort and maximum return of traceable data - fast.