The EMPF is constantly involved with both electronic manufacturing and depot repair centers building military/aerospace systems. These installations are continuously challenged to assure rework, maintenance and repair of returned new product and legacy-based Shop Replaceable Units (SRU) and Line Replaceable Units (LRU).

Over the last five years, the EMPF has noted that SEICA's Automated Test Equipment (ATE) can provide cost controlled migration solutions from well known ATE, including CA Marathon, Teradyne L300 and LASAR simulator, and Schlumberger S790. They have gained a major understanding on how to design new ATE technology with an eye to old practices and requirements.

To support this endeavor, SEICA ATE was deployed at critical installations together with a number of Test Program Sets (TPS) and dedicated fixtures for each specific program or application.

Digital test flexibility was achieved by the ability to provide drive/detect and load capability at each I/O (Input/Output) of the SRU or LRU with enough flexibility to deal with all available technologies (TTL, ECL, and CMOS). Parametric analog tests were enabled by providing access, for each channel, to a centralized bank of DC/AC proprietary or IEC Standards driven instrumentation.

The guided probe of the equipment allowed diagnostics to the component level, with data generation either from a known good board (KGB) or from simulation.

When the older ATE can no longer be kept in operation, migration of the entire logistic to a new ATE becomes critical to support the requirements of test.

By carefully planning the routing of the instrument(s) to the points of test coupled with the flexibility of the ATE architecture, a high rate of test coverage in the transition was realized.

When possible, the original test program should be converted intact to preserve the formal structure and then validated to insure performance with new instrumentation.

Another issue is the awareness that fixtures age and wear out; requiring an inspection to validate operational conditions. When catastrophic defects are found, replacement of the unit or refurbishing of the unit may be considered, but may not be economically viable, particularly when fixtures include active electronics.

An accepted option is building a fixture adapter between the new ATE receiver and the old fixtures provided the new ATE is configured to provide an adequate number of non multiplexed independently programmable analog/digital resources per pin. The process in reviewing program migration must include the availability/access to the new ATE environment, the TPS, and fixture/adapter costs.

Migration of test programs and fixtures from GR1795, GR1796 and GR1799 to a modern ATE is in great demand.

The software and hardware architecture of SEICA's modern ATE system has been adapted to blend new technology with old requirements. There is a great lesson to be learned: given the unchanged needs of the military/aerospace industry to warrant a program's life across many decades, it is important to consider backwards compatibility when redesigning support systems. The EMPF, in partnership with SEICA, plans to incorporate the SEICA ATE equipment (Figure 6-1) on the EMPF Demonstration Factory floor in support of this premise.

For further information or a demonstration of this, or any of the other electronics manufacturing equipment at the EMPF’s Demonstration Factory, please contact Bob Berta at (610) 362-1200, extension 253, or rberta@aciusa.org.