A Methodology to Design Test Sites for Electronic Products based on Figure-of-Merit

Abstract

Electronic companies launch new products frequently and spend a lot of time to verify their designs. These designs are verified through rigorous validation carried out using several pre manufacturing tests. The products are ready for manufacturing after passing these tests. At this stage, the companies setup test-sites for testing these products, which are different from validation tests. At the moment there is no standard way of deciding how to setup a test-site. Normally the parameters used for taking this decision include the type of testing required, test partial or complete batch, type of equipment to be used etc. The existing techniques rely on few parameters and the selection of these parameters also vary due to lack of standard method. This paper is a step towards defining a common approach to setup test sites. In this research a software application is developed using LabVIEW to implement a standard way of setting up a test-site. The software prompts test site design authority to enter parameters required to setup a test site using voice of customer (VoC), figure of merit (FoM), database (DB) and test readiness review (TRR) interfaces. This application is linked to a database containing test equipment details and previous test sites data like test jigs, interface adapters, estimated and actual test times, first time yield etc. Based on the user input data the software performs analysis and generate reports to setup a test site and also evaluate test readiness of the test site. This approach incorporates most of the techniques required to setup for most of the electronic products.