Product Validation & Production Test System – For complex Mission-critical sub-system

Challenge

The customer needed to upgrade their existing test system.  Their old test system was very manual:

• It did not provide ability for unattended operation
• The thermal control had to be set manually
• They wanted to do less manual review of the data

The client develops mission-critical products, so there’s a desire to reduce manual operations because they have to explain any anomalies, and manual operations are typically more error-prone.  They needed repeatable results that they could trust.

Solution

Viewpoint developed a new test system that utilized new hardware and software, augmented by existing low level hardware and firmware.  The test system was developed to perform both functional test for production and environmental testing, and was designed to handle up to 4 DUTs at once. The test system utilizes the StepWise test executive software with custom test steps, which allowed the client to create their own highly configurable test sequences.  The system was developed in two phases, with the second phase adding support for a FPGA expansion backplane (NI CompactRIO chassis) in order to provide future capability for bringing some of the microcontroller sequence activity into the NI space. In addition, the previous version had a mix of serial, TTL, and USB instrumentation, which was not as robust as Ethernet based instrumentation. Phase II involved upgrading to all Ethernet based instrumentation, and did away with the original test system’s many manual toggle switches that could be used instead of the programmable mode through the SW.

Benefits

• ~40% test time reduction per unit
• ~25% reduction in anomalies that needed to be justified
• ~500 manhours saved in test execution

System Overview