Parallel board test brings higher throughput in smaller footprint, says Keysight
For high volume products which require a small form factor, typically found in consumer electronics, IoT devices, consumer medical and automotive markets, Keysight Technologies has introduced the i7090 massively parallel board test system.
This is a new category of automated test equipment, says Keysight, designed to perform tests in parallel, on multiple PCB assemblies (PCBAs), to achieve high volume throughput. This in turn accelerates time-to-market and reduces cost-of-test, Keysight says.
Current systems on the market only support up to four cores in parallel. To meet manufacturing demands, however, more systems need to be tested, incurring scale and infrastructure costs, a larger footprint and additional labour cost for support and maintenance.
Keysight’s massively parallel board test system supports up to 20 cores in parallel with PCI eXtensions for Instrumentation (PXI) based in-circuit test capability. The core configuration is therefore variable and not confined to a fixed number of rows, which reduces overall computing costs.
To expand functionality, Keysight OpenTAP support enables open platforms for integration of hardware. Users can scale resources, as needed, and with extensible instrumentation and pin cards.
Christopher Cain, vice president of Keysight’s Electronic Industrial Products, likened the innovation to that of parallel core computing: “Massively parallel computation cores enable modern computers to deliver breakthrough performance. The i7090 board test system brings a similar capability into PCBA manufacturing test and programming,” he said. “The i7090 has an innovative modular architecture that delivers breakthrough throughput in a small footprint,” he added.
It is equipped with industry 4.0 automation and analytics for a capability that can be optimised for a variety of high volume PCBA manufacturing tasks.
There are 20 parallel cores in a small system footprint, measuring 600mm in width.
Unpowered and vectorless test extended performance (VTEP) technologies ensure rapid test throughput, reduced cost fixtures and high fault coverage, says Keysight.
There is support for multi-platform hardware in a standard 480mm rack and the programming function integration provides in-system programming with 160 channels in parallel, increasing system throughput.
Keysight’s i7090 massively parallel board test system is available now.
