Production Test Equipment Research Articles

Information and telecommunication system of digital factory and smart factory Industry 4.0

The task is to create information and telecommunication system of digital and smart factories of Industry4.0. Components are defined for information and telecommunication system, their properties and purpose are described. The scheme of digital factory information and telecommunication system is given. This scheme includes the physical equipment (machines) and virtual machines (cloud services and models) to support project activity of the designer. The scheme of smart factory information and telecommunication system is given. The scheme unites the cyber and physical production equipment and test equipment used for manufacturing on the basis of digital informative technologies. The given schemes are important in practice to organize the informative exchange among cyber and physical systems and designers of the project companies and operators of production companies to manufacture and transfer into exploitation the items of instrument-making, tool engineering, and mechanical engineering.

Open systems architecture solutions for military avionics testing

Raytheon makes extensive use of open systems architecture methods in developing special test equipment (STE) for testing military avionics equipment. Such use has resulted in significant cost and schedule savings in the development of production test equipment for radar and infrared systems. With open systems architectures, a test system can be assembled using COTS products. This brings economies of scale to test equipment, which is normally built in very low quantities. Therefore, the potential cost savings due to COTS usage is proportionately greater in STE than in the higher volume avionics systems that are tested. A second major benefit of using COTS products is that test system development schedule cycle time is greatly reduced. This paper describes the application of Open Systems Architectures (OSA) to avionics testing. The following major architectures are surveyed: VME bus, VXI bus, IEEE GPIB, IEEE 1149.1 JTAG test bus, 1553 Military Bus, Fibre Channel, and COTS Test Applications Software. We describe how the benefits of OSA have been extended at Raytheon into achieving vertical test commonalities. The flexibility of OSA can be exploited to provide an overall optimum test solution, taking all levels of test into account. For example, test systems can be tailored with COTS products to provide integrated methods for avionics tests at the module, unit, and system levels. Test systems can be configured to maximize the reuse of COTS hardware over all test levels. Test software can also be programmed to optimize such reuse over levels of test. Additional test verticality synergies derived from such OSA usage are described, including: test false alarm avoidance; test cones of tolerance optimization; and efficient test of field returns.

Mixed signal test — techniques, applications and demands

The increasing importance of next generation test technology to provide high quality, low cost fault detection methodologies is becoming a big issue in the microelectronics industry. For digital ASICs, techniques such as I-ddq and built-in-self test are being introduced to supplement or in some cases replace stuck-at-testing that has been shown to be inadequate for the circuit complexities and quality levels demanded. For analogue and mixed signal ICs, a similar trend is evident. Increasing circuit complexity, higher performance and the demand for high quality levels is causing the industry to question currently used functional and specification based test programs. In addition, the escalating costs of production test equipment capable of measuring high performance device parameters is in many cases becoming a limiting factor. The authors review the current state-of-the-art in mixed signal and analogue test technology with particular reference to the consumer electronics industry. Trends in key issues such as design-for-test, fault simulation, defect detection, CAD and tester support are discussed and the possible future role of these techniques is proposed for the next generation of single chip analogue and mixed signal test systems.

Vibration qualification of a photodetector susceptible to microphonic noise

A missile-borne photodetector is used to receive uplink guidance information carried on a laser beam. It is supported on a structure which vibrates intensely in response to aeroacoustical excitation. Detectors of this construction have been found to have widely varying susceptibility to vibration in the degree to which they exhibit microphonic noise. Each manufactured detector is subjected to 2–20 kHz random vibration on a piezoelectric shake table and is rejected for use if its noise output exceeds the allowed level. The development of the environmental requirement is reviewed and the production test equipment is described.