Design & Production Verification Lifecycle Of An EW Receiver Line Replaceable Unit (LRU) According To The Military Standards

Abstract

This paper reviews the typical design and production verification lifecycle of an EW receiver Line Replacement Unit (LRU) according to the military standards and conforming the hardware development processes. The verification lifecycle of such an LRU begins with the preliminary design review. Test design engineer is responsible for reviewing the requirements in terms of testability. In the next step test definitions for each requirement are prepared and test infrastructures including test software, cabling, test fixtures, mechanical fixtures, Automatic Test Equipment etc. are designed. Typical milestones of the verification tests are; –Functional tests in laboratory environment, –Environmental conditions tests according to standards such as MIL-STD-810 –Electromagnetic Compatibility tests according to the standards such as MIL-STD-461 After the corresponding tests on the prototype unit have been completed, the unit is ready for integration tests and the results of the conducted tests are reported in Hardware Test Report. Finally, the necessary production test infrastructure including test setup, test documentation, Environmental Stress Screening infrastructure are prepared by the same test design engineer for verifying the mass production units. Within this paper, for a typical EW receiver LRU, examples for the types of tests conducted, typical testing times, characteristics of the test setups, difficulties encountered during the whole testing activities are also given.