PCBA Tech - Current Status of PCBA In Line Online Testing

The rapid development of electronic technology has made electronic products widely used in various industries of the national economy. Electronic products play a key role in automatic control, household appliances, office equipment, and aerospace systems in industrial sites. Among them, PCBA (Printed Circuit Board Assemble), as an important part of electronic products, provides electrical connections between circuit components and components, and is a support for circuit components in electronic products. At present, PCBA is becoming more and more complex, and hundreds or even thousands of components are often integrated on a PCBA. When these high-density multilayer PCBAs are found to be faulty and unusable after they are installed in the equipment, the loss is huge. Therefore, in these PCBA production processes, the diagnosis of faults and the control of the production process have become a key link that affects the benefits of enterprises.

With the development of science and technology, electronic products are widely used in people's daily life and industrial production. Circuit board (PCBA) is an important part of electronic products, and its performance directly determines the quality of the entire product to a large extent. At the same time, with the growth of China's electronic product market, there are higher requirements for the quality of printed circuit boards. Correspondingly, in order to ensure the reliability of electronic products, the testing requirements in the PCBA production process have also been continuously improved. In the global industry 4.0, intelligent manufacturing and China 2025 and other large environments, it is gradually developing in the direction of automation, intelligence and high precision. .

In the global industry 4.0, intelligent manufacturing and China 2025 and other big environments, in the modern, high-efficiency and high-efficiency production, in the face of complex electronic equipment, traditional manual testing not only consumes a lot of time and human resources, but also adopts automatic testing platforms. Promoting production automation can effectively alleviate this problem. Therefore, in actual work, only with the help of advanced PCBA automatic test technology can we cope with contemporary complex electronic equipment. However, it is expensive to purchase automatic test equipment at home and abroad, and the non-automatic test equipment purchased by most companies has not yet reached the phase-out stage. Therefore, most companies also rely on a large number of manual methods to complete the testing of circuit-made boards, resulting in low automation, slow diagnostic testing, wasting manpower and time, and reducing overall production efficiency. In order to solve the above problems, it is imperative to independently develop a low-cost, high-precision multi-track PCBA automatic online test platform to realize PCBA test automation and test equipment generalization, and to improve the efficiency of PCBA testing.

The development of electronic technology has led to the simultaneous development of testing technology. In order to improve the automation of PCBA testing and maintenance, the development of automatic test systems for printed boards began in the 1960s and 1970s in the world. The first to appear is the in-circuit tester ICT (In-Circuit Test), which is mainly aimed at the inspection of components and assembly quality. Online testing is based on physical contact and power-on testing. PCBA passes the ICT test, which can quickly find bad components and manufacturing defects to a certain extent, and provide diagnostic and repair reports at the same time. ICT originated in the United States. Then, with the rapid development of Japan’s economy, especially the scale of its electronics industry, ICT testing technology developed rapidly, and later extended to Taiwan. In 2000, domestic ICT became a climate, and ICT testing has become electronic product processing. A very popular technology in the industry.

At the same time as ICT technology, there is also an automatic tester (ATE, Automatic Test Equipment), which is mainly used to test the functions of integrated circuits and related peripheral circuits. It is a technology for specific IC components and PCBA circuit testing. According to the purpose of the test, ATE can be divided into characteristic test, product test, aging test and factory test. The history of the development of ATE technology represents the history of the formation of the PCBA complete machine test system, and has gradually become the mainstream of PCBA testing. Many professional ATE system integrators have emerged as the times require. Even now, in many electronic complete machine product processing enterprises, For some PCBAs that contain smart chips, ATE is still the first solution for circuit functional testing.

At present, the typical automatic online tester products used for PCBA abroad: the series of circuit board test systems manufactured by Agilent not only provide online test capabilities but also other test functions, which can carry out the most extensive test on PCBA, and thus can satisfy most The needs of mainstream electronics manufacturers. The test system has added a new infrastructure to add, control and connect external electronic devices or instruments more flexibly. The system allows external electronic equipment to be inserted into the test machine as if the equipment had been integrated into the system. The external electronic device can be a functional test circuit, which is used to provide additional functional test range for ICT, or to provide additional incentives for the unit under test to improve test coverage. The external electronic equipment control, test sequence and test results are still realized through the BT-BASIC test program, which is implemented by the computer of the test machine familiar to the user. Typical automatic online tester products used for PCBA in Taiwan: The INLINE assembled circuit board tester made in Taiwan can provide economical customized test solutions according to customers' test needs, and can fully meet the test requirements of most customers. INLINE integrates MDA and optional ICT and FT test functions on the same platform, which can streamline manpower, shorten test time and increase productivity. The domestic automatic online testing machine used for PCBA can fully automatic online test ICT and FT function test, and is equipped with automatic circuit board filter, independent connection of the board to be tested, to achieve seamless high-speed transmission.

At present, fully automatic test production lines in the PCB market are usually newly designed according to customer needs. Therefore, most traditional production lines currently need to add automatic test functions, and the entire production line must be redesigned and replaced. Or purchase brand new automated test equipment, and the current fully automated test equipment is based on the automation of its own equipment (that is, the focus is on the test function), which has the disadvantage of not being versatile, and there are not many products to choose from. This type of equipment faces four problems. One is the increase in procurement costs; the other is that the existing test equipment needs to be eliminated; the third is that the test fixtures used by different brands of equipment are not universal, resulting in an increase in subsequent use costs; the fourth is the use of new equipment There is a process of training and proficiency.