Degree in Computer science, study or engineering. Professional certificates in ICT training is an added advantage. 6 years post NYSC experience. Interested and qualified candidates should forward their CV to: cv@infytel.net using the position as subject of email. November 11, 2022. ICT/FCT Testing, Final Assembly. We are a polish-owned private enterprise and hire 120+ skilled employees. The factory building was designed and constructed specially for the purposes of electronic production. Quality is the key. Check our workmanship standards and quality methods. Certificate ICT/MDA Test FIxture. JIG and Fixture. Industry Robot 4.0. Material / ESD Material. Products Over View Industry Robot 4.0 Functional Test (FCT) posted Oct 19, 2009, 10:41 PM by GET AUTOTEK CO., LTD. [ updated Sep 19, 2017, 7:25 AM] FUNCTIONAL TEST WASHING M/C FIXTURE TEST End-of-Line test applications are also solved with these series of test probes worldwide. Special purpose machine building companies, who manufacture dedicated assembly and test stations for final products all use these type of probes. FCT Test Probes ICT Probes FCT Probes LEDProbes Semicon Probes Threaded Probes RF Probes High - Current Probes ICT - Flexible Multi-Core Parallel/Merged-Core Tester. TR5001 SII QDI SERIES - Equip-Test Kft. • Flexible Multi-Core Parallel / Merged-Core Tester• Serial Test Controller with up to 8 ports on any pin• Light - Curtain Protected Press - Down Platform• PXI Ready• Built-in Self Diagnostics and Auto-Calibration function• High-Accuracy Measurement• Flow - based Easy Program Development sOsl. What is ICT and FCT in PCB assembly test April 08 , 2021 Before the PCB assembly product is delivered to the customer, it must be rigorously tested. PCB assembly testing is the key to ensuring the quality of shipments. Customers will provide a test plan for us,there are including test points, procedures and test steps. In PCB assembly testing, FCT functional testing and ICT electrical component testing are the most common. ICT test： The ICT test of the PCB assembly is mainly through the test probe contacting the test point on the PCB boardwith components, which can detect the short circuit, the open circuit and the component welding and other fault problems. ICT is characterized by fast, accurate, high-tempo, and the test can be completed in about 3 to 5 seconds. It is controlled by a computer program to accurately measure, reduce the risk of misjudgment and missed measurement, and reduce the troubles of the production line. ICT can know which part or which circuit is connected through a computer program to facilitate maintenance, speed up the production process, reduce time costs, and improve product quality. FCT test： In PCB assembly, FCT function test is a test tool, which is divided into two parts, one is the main part and the other is the test fixture part. The main part includes a computer system and a signal sampling system. The PCB boardwith components is mainly placed on the test rack, and the test points on the PCB boardwith components is captured by the test fixture, so as to provide a simulation operating environment such as excitation and load through the PCB boardwith components . The board's various status parameters can be obtained through the FCT function tester to detect the board Whether the functional parameters meet the design requirements, the test fixture part has a fixed size, and the positioning holes are made according to different target test boards. To test different PCB boardwith components , you only need to change the test fixture, and then call up the corresponding test program on the computer. FCT function test items mainly include voltage, current, power, power factor, frequency, duty cycle, brightness and color, character recognition, voice recognition, temperature measurement, pressure measurement, motion control, FLASH and EEPROM burning, etc. The testing process is all done automatically by the computer. Both efficiency and pass rate are guaranteed. Previous Post What is the difference between PCBA wave soldering and manual soldering Next Post PCBA SMT Production Process Introduction Production test of a finished electronic product often involves two techniques in-circuit test ICT and functional component test FCT. The ICT technique examines a non-powered circuit board to measure attributes such as inductance, capacitance, impedance, and resistance of individual components and to check for opens, shorts, and incorrect or misoriented components. FCT applies power to a device under test DUT and measures its input and output characteristics under load, typically using a completely different test adapter. It is possible, though, to use a single adapter for both tests with careful adapter design. ICT typically uses a bed-of-nails probing approach and techniques such as direct digital synthesis DDS and Discrete Fourier Transform DFT to generate stimulus signals and to perform analogue measurement analysis. This allows an in-circuit analyser ICA to determine a DUT is within tolerances without having to power up the device. A relay multiplexer controls the interconnection between the nail contacts and the relevant analogue channel or digital driver/sensor D/S on the probe board Figure 1. Figure 1 This typical bed-of-nails probe uses a 2×16 relay multiplexer only one channel is shown in the schematic. While an ICA module can also be used to carry out limited FCT by applying power to the device and measuring its input and output characteristics, FCT typically requires its own test adapter. There are several practical reasons for using a separate adapter. Separate adapters are typical First, ICT bed-of-nails probes are not rated to carry the supply voltage or load current necessary to carry out a full-function test on powered-up devices. A dedicated FCT test-bed will typically have heavy-duty contacts designed to carry higher currents or voltages without overheating, arcing, or suffering from excessive wear. Further, because these heavy-duty contacts take up more space than typical ICT probes, FCT test adapters can typically check only one DUT at a time. Second, the internal programmable power supplies, relays, and electronic loads in an ICT analyser are typically not designed for high current testing. Simply swapping the power supply units for more powerful versions can cause serious interference problems with the sensitive ICT analogue measurements. The higher currents can introduce measurement inaccuracies due to ground-bounce, voltage drop along wiring, and through transients generated from switching inductive loads. A dedicated FCT adapter usually makes its measurements at lower resolution and with heavier filtering, so it is less sensitive to interference. Also, the power supplies and relay contacts of a dedicated FCT adapter are more robust and able to switch more than one amp. The relay interface hardware and the software control used to change the relay configuration in the ICA modules are also typically different. In an ICT application, configuration often uses a parallel input output PIO controller and relay driver Figure 2. In these applications relay switching speed is not usually an issue; the relays are mainly reconfigured at the end of each DUT test to multiplex connections from one pin assembly to the next. In an FCT test adapter, however, the relays must change the functional test setup for each separate test on each DUT, so the control data throughput to the relays is higher. In a dedicated FCT set-up, the need for higher throughput is not an issue as only one DUT gets checked at a time. A combined ICT/FCT adapter, however, will need to test multiple devices at the same time, making the relay control’s speed limitation a major bottleneck in production test. Figure 2 The test system typically uses a PIO to control the relay configuration. Finally, while ICT measurements can be made in milliseconds, FCT procedures are typically much slower. Measurements made while the DUT is powered up cannot be made instantaneously; the outputs have to settle before a reliable measurement can be taken. Typically, then, the FCT process will take five to 10 times as long to complete as the ICT process for the same product. If testing is combined in one ICT/FCT platform, then, the FCT part could be a bottleneck in production. Keeping the two processes separated allows one ICT machine to feed several FCT testbeds used in parallel, increasing the throughput and reducing the bottleneck. Despite these considerations, however, Recom Power found that, for the newly-developed DC/DC product series, the additional cost and testing time of using two separate test adapters was not acceptable. Combining the high-speed advantage of ICT with the practical quality assurance of 100% FCT, all in one test adapter, was a technically complex challenge the product series covered devices with up to 6A output current and input voltages up to 60V. Each PCB panel contained forty partly-finished modules, which required parallel testing using heavy-duty power supplies. The data throughput was therefore very high, and any timing errors could be problematic. Recom contracted Elmatest in the Czech Republic to build a combined ICT/FCT test adapter for the manufacturing service provider, Teledyne Teststation LH. Creating a combined ICT/FCT test adapter Working in close cooperation, Elmatest application engineer Zdenek Martinek and Markus Stöger from Recom’s R&D department, realised that this was no ordinary project. There were several significant problems that needed to be solved how to combine ICT/FCT in one multi-panel, how to handle the high relay control throughput, how to accelerate the FCT process, and how to cope with the high power levels without harming the sensitive probes. Fortunately, solutions were found for all of these issues. The first problem that needed to be solved was how to combine ICT/FCT given the product’s multi-panel design. Each PCB contained 40 independent circuit modules, not part-built but complete products that were already finished, cased, and screen-printed. Not all of their internal nodes were accessible to the ICT pin panel; this was deliberate. The DC/DC converter switches at high internal frequencies and it is integral to the product concept that the metal case and its multi-layer PCB form a complete six-sided Faraday cage to avoid EMI issues. Any external connections to an internal high frequency switching node would form a pathway for EMI to pass through the EMC seal and to radiate, possibly causing measurement errors. The solution to testing these enclosed and inaccessible modules was to include a test module on each multi-panel. The test module allowed access to all of its necessary ICT nodes so that we could verify that each panel is built correctly. Once the conventional ICT procedure is carried out on the panel using the test module, then the remaining modules need be FCT-checked only. Figure 3 The multi-panel PCB top and bottom shown has an ICT test module in one corner to support board testing. The code required to carry out a single test and measurement process is called a test vector. The arrangement of the inputs, outputs, and analogue channel configurations required to carry out the measurement gets transmitted to the test controller as a data burst.’ These configurations are loaded into local on-board memory, then a timing strobe signal activates them simultaneously. The configuration stays latched until the test has been completed and the measurement data transferred back to the CPU. In the meantime, the next data burst can be pre-loaded into the registers to await the next strobe signal. This methodology is what allows ICT to achieve its very fast throughput of around 4µs per vector. The standard relay drivers used in the GenRad Teststation, however, are driven from the PIO controller, which in turn receives its commands from the controlling PC via a MXIbus Fig 2. This arrangement proved to be too slow for the project. The goal was to process different FCT measurements within a single test vector using the high-speed system controller to control the relay configuration. In order to accelerate the relay switching rate, a novel relay driver topology was implemented in the Recom test adapter, based on a technique called active burst.’ In active burst, some of the relays are driven not from the PIO controller card but directly from the D/S outputs, which are kept active until the ICA measurements have been completed. Each D/S can be configured with nine separate functions idle, drive low or high, sense low or high, hold, drive with deep serial memory, sense with deep serial memory, and collect CRC data. In this case, the drive function was used to directly power the relays. The D/S drive output is limited to TTL voltage and current levels, though, which are normally not sufficient to operate a relay without a separate driver. But by building the test adapter using Darlington transistor current amplifier relay coils, the D/S modules were able to operate the relays directly, bypassing the PIO controller. This direct operation made the relay control practically instantaneous and made the coding much simpler. Accelerating the FCT The second problem that needed to be solved was how to accelerate the test’s FCT process. Waiting for the analogue levels to settle would have made the overall testing unacceptably slow. The technique we applied was to utilize the processing power already inherent in the ICA system for tests such as component impedance measurements Figure 4. We invoked waveform generation and analysis techniques such DDS and DFT, which are inherently faster than any analogue bridge balancing measurement technique. The breakthrough was to realise that these same advanced techniques could also be used to determine the powered-up functional testing results. Instead of applying a fixed load, waiting for the output to stabilise, and then measuring the input and output currents and voltages, we could pulse the output load for a few milliseconds and then derive the final output characteristics from the processed results. This approach reduced the measurement time by up to 80%. Figure 4 Measuring terminal impedance in ICT uses a digitally synthesized source to drive the component and DFT to analyse the result. One significant development issue we faced was matching such dynamic load and supply switching with the ancient “spaghetti” software the GenRad test station used. This legacy software was a mix of Pascal, Assembler, and Basic. Further, GenRad ceased to exist as a separate company back in 2003. It is a tribute to the robustness of their design, however, that even today it is possible to piggy-back state-of-the-art operating systems on top of the original hardware. Avoiding probe damage The solution to the FCT acceleration problem, using pulsed load signals, also solved the third problem how to avoid damaging the sensitive probes. Because we pulsed the load current for only a very short time, there was no noticeable local heating at the very fine contact area, even with 6A peak current through a probe rated at only 2A. We were able to program the on-time/off-time ratio so that, even with sequential measurements, the probe tip had time to cool down between pulses and would not burn or scorch. This pulsed load technique also meant that the power supplies were not overloaded. One of the ICT tests is to measure the internal voltage divider resistances used to pre-set the product’s output voltage. We leveraged the results of this ICT test in the FCT test. The test system could automatically derive the output voltage, output current, and input voltage range from ICT and then pass these values on to the FCT test program to carry out the appropriate functional testing. This automation eliminated the possibility of operator error setting the FCT variables out-of-range and damaging either the product or the expensive pin boards or programmable power supplies. Figure 5 The finished test adapter can complete its full combined test of a module in under two seconds. The combination of allowing ICT access through a test module, direct drive of configuration relays by the test adapter’s driver/sensor lines, and pulsed load signals made the combined ICT/FCT test adapter possible. The net result of applying all of these techniques is a combined ICT/FCT test time of between and seconds per DC/DC module, meaning that a complete PCB multi-panel can be 100% tested in less than 80 seconds. This includes the time needed to remove the tested PCB and place the next PCB to be tested into the test adapter. The cumulative time- and cost-saving for a minimum production run of 5000 has been instrumental in the resulting success of the entire product series. As a result of this achievement, the Recom Power Module’s initial design has now been extended from a single series with eight variants to three different series with a total of 22 variants, all sharing the same footprint and test adapter. Steve Roberts is the innovation manager of Recom Power. Related articles In-circuit PROM tester Evaluate fixture strategies for ICT PCB test nails or TAP? Testing with less stress In-Circuit Testing ICT is an established method of analysing an electronic product in production. Typically, a bed-of-nails approach is used to test a non-powered circuit board and techniques such as Direct Digital Synthesis DDS and Discrete Fourier Transform DFT are used to generate stimulus signals and to perform analogue measurement analysis. This allows the In-Circuit Analyser ICA to measure real-world attributes such as inductance, capacitance, impedance and resistance to check if all of the Device Under Test DUT test node results are within tolerance and if any component is open, shorted, incorrect or misoriented, all without having to power up the DUT. The interconnection between the nail contacts and the relevant analogue channel or digital Driver/Sensor D/S on the pin board is accomplished by using a relay multiplexer Figure 1. Figure 1 Typical bed-of-nails 2x16 relay multiplexer only one channel shown in the diagram In some more advanced systems, the ICA module can also be used to carry out limited functional component testing FCT by applying power to the device and measuring the input and output characteristics under load. More often, this test is done separately with a second test adapter. There are several practical reasons for doing this Firstly, the ICT bed-of-nails probes are not rated to carry the necessary supply voltage or load current to carry out a full function test on powered-up devices. A dedicated FCT test-bed will have heavy-duty contacts designed to carry higher currents or voltages without overheating, arcing or suffering from excessive wear. The disadvantage is that these heavy-duty contacts take up more space and therefore FCT test adapters typically check only one DUT at a time. Secondly, the ICA internal programmable power supplies, relays and electronic loads are also not designed for high current testing. If the power supply units are simply swapped out for more powerful versions, the higher current can cause serious interference problems with the sensitive ICT analogue measurements, including introduction of measurement inaccuracies due to ground-bounce, voltage drop along wiring and through transients generated from switching inductive loads. The measurements carried out in a dedicated FCT adapter are usually lower resolution with heavier filtering, so they are less sensitive to interference. Also, the power supplies and relay contacts are more robust and able to switch more than one amp. Thirdly, the relay interface hardware and software control used to change the relay configuration is typically via a Parallel Input Output PIO controller and relay driver Figure 2. For ICT applications, the relay switching speed is not usually an issue as the relays are mainly reconfigured at the end of each DUT test to multiplex connections from one pin assembly to the next. However, in an FCT test adapter, the relays are used to change the functional test setup for each separate test on each DUT, so the control data throughput to the relays is higher. In a dedicated FCT set-up, this is not an issue as only one DUT is checked at a time, but if multiple devices are going to be tested in a combined ICT/FCT adapter, then the speed limitation of the relay control is a major bottleneck. Figure 2 Test System Block Diagram Finally, while ICT measurements can be made in milliseconds, FCT procedures are typically much slower as measurements made while the unit is powered up cannot be made instantaneously; the outputs have to settle before a reliable measurement can be taken. Typically, the FCT process will take five to ten times as long as ICT to complete for the same product. If the testing is combined in one ICT/FCT platform, then the FCT part could be a bottleneck in production. If the two processes are separated, then one ICT machine could feed several FCT testbeds used in parallel to increase the throughput and reduce the bottleneck. Nevertheless, for a newly developed DC/DC product series developed by the Austrian company Recom Power, the additional cost and testing time for two separate test adapters was not acceptable. A way had to be found to combine the high speed advantage of ICT with the practical quality assurance of 100% functional testing, all in one test adapter. This was technically a complex challenge the product series covered devices with up to 6A output current and input voltages up to 60V. Each PCB panel contained forty partly-finished modules which meant that parallel testing was required using heavy-duty power supplies. The data throughput was therefore not only very high but any timing errors could be problematic. Recom contracted Elmatest in the Czech Republic to build a combined ICT/FCT test adapter for the Teledyne Teststation LH used by the EMS provider. From the beginning, Zdenek Martinek, the application engineer at Elmatest, realised that this was no ordinary project. There were several significant problems that needed to be solved how to combine ICT/FCT in one multi-panel, how to handle the high relay control throughput, how to accelerate the FCT process and how to cope with the high power levels without harming the sensitive probes. In close co-operation with Markus Stöger from Recom’s R&D department, a solution was found for all of these issues. The first problem that needed to be solved was how to combine ICT/FCT in the multi-panel design of the product. Each PCB contained 40 independent circuits. These modules were not part-built, but complete products, already finished, cased and screen printed and not all of the internal nodes were accessible to the ICT pin panel. This was deliberate. The DC/DC converter switches at high internal frequencies and it is integral to the product concept that the metal case and its multi-layer PCB forms a complete six-sided faraday cage to avoid EMI issues. Any external connections to an internal high frequency switching node would form a pathway for EMI to pass through the EMC seal and to radiate, possibly causing measurement errors. The solution to “How to ICT test an enclosed and inaccessible product?” was to create a test module on each multi-panel. The test module allows access to all of the ICT nodes necessary on the test module to verify that each panel is built correctly. Once the conventional ICT procedure is carried out on the test module, then the remaining modules need be FCT-checked only. Figure 3 Top and bottom images of the multi-panel PCB showing the ICT test module in the corner. The code required to carry out a single test and measurement process is called a test vector. The arrangement of the inputs, outputs and analogue channel configurations required to carry out the measurement is transmitted as a data burst’. These configurations are loaded into local on-board memory and then simultaneously activated by a timing strobe signal. This configuration is then latched until the test has been completed and the measurement data has been transferred back to the CPU. However, in the meantime, the next data burst can be pre-loaded into the registers to await the next strobe signal. This methodology is what allows ICT to achieve its very fast throughput of around 4µs per vector. However, the standard relay drivers used in the GenRad Teststation are driven from the Parallel Input/Output PIO controller which in turn is given commands from the controlling PC via a MXIbus Figure 2. This arrangement proved to be too slow for our project where we want to process different FCT measurements within a single test vector using the high speed System Controller to control the relay configuration. In order to accelerate the relay switching rate, a novel relay driver topology was implemented in the Recom test adapter, based on a technique called active burst’. In active burst, some of the relays are not driven from the PIO controller card, but driven directly from the D/S outputs which are kept active until the ICA measurements have been completed. Each D/S can be configured with 9 separate functions Idle, Drive low or high, Sense low or high, Hold, Drive with deep serial memory, Sense with deep serial memory and Collect CRC data, so in our case, we used the Drive function to directly power the relays. The D/S Drive output is limited to TTL voltage and current levels, normally not sufficient to operate a relay without a separate driver, but by building the test adapter using Darlington transistor current amplifier relay coils, the D/S modules were able to operate the relays directly, bypassing the PIO controller. This made the relay control practically instant and made the coding much simpler. The second problem that needed to be solved was how to accelerate the FCT part of the test; waiting for the analogue levels to settle would have made the overall testing still unacceptably slow. The technique used here was to use the processing power already inherent in the ICA system. Waveform generation and analysis techniques such Direct Digital Synthesis DDS and Discrete Fourier Transform DFT were used, which are inherently faster than any analogue bridge balancing measurement technique. The breakthrough was to realise that these same advanced techniques could also be used to determine the powered-up functional testing results. Instead of applying a fixed load, waiting for the output to stabilise and then measuring the input and output currents and voltages, the output load could be pulsed for a few milliseconds and the processed results used to derive the final output characteristics. This reduced the measurement time by up to 80%. Figure 4 6-Terminal Impedance Measurement One significant development issue was matching such dynamic load and supply switching with the ancient “spaghetti” software used in the GenRad test station, which is a mix of Pascal, Assembler and Basic. However, although GenRad ceased to exist as a separate company back in 2003, it is a tribute to the robustness of the design that even today it is possible to piggy-back state-of-the-art operating systems on top of the original hardware. The solution to the second problem also solved the third problem how to avoid damaging the sensitive probes. As the load current was pulsed only for a very short time, there was no noticeable local heating at the very fine contact area, even with 6A peak current through a probe rated at only two amps. The on-time/off-time ratio could also be programmed so that even with sequential measurements, the probe tip had time to cool down between pulses and would not burn or scorch. This pulsed load technique also meant that the power supplies were not overloaded. ICT is also used to measure the internal voltage divider resistances used to pre-set the output voltage, allowing the test system to automatically derive the output voltage, output current and input voltage range from ICT and then pass these values on to the FCT test program so that the appropriate functional testing can be carried out. This eliminates the possibility of operator error setting the FCT variables out-of-range and damaging either the product or the expensive pin boards or programmable power supplies. The net result of all of these techniques is a combined ICT/FCT test time of between and seconds per DC/DC module, meaning that a complete PCB multi-panel can be 100% tested in less than 80 seconds, including removal of the tested PCB and placement of the next PCB to be tested into the test adapter. With a minimum production run of 5000, the cumulative time-saving has been instrumental in the resulting success of the entire product series. So much so, that the initial design of the RPM module has now been extended from a single series with eight variants to three different series with a total of twenty-two variants, all sharing the same footprint and test adapter. Figure 5 The finished test adapter in action RECOM We Power your Products Standard spring-loaded test probes GKS Standard probes GKS without collars have proven themselves time and again to be ideally suited for ICT and FCT. Depending on the working stroke of the test fixture or the components and test points to be contacted, different installation heights are necessary. These are achieved by the combination of test probe and receptacle. Only in this way can the optimum working stroke with nominal spring force be achieved. Long stroke probes In addition to the version with standard working stroke there are probes GKS with long working stroke which allow a combination of ICT and FCT in a dual-stage test fixture. If necessary, the signals are transferred to a transfer PCB via a spring-loaded plunger using wireless contact receptacles; this eliminates the need for wiring. Short/robust test probes Short/robust test probes are characterised by their durable, compact design. This makes these probes suitable for demanding ICT/ FCT applications with limited space as well as in larger grids. INGUN E-TYPE test probes INGUN E-TYPE test probes have a higher preload in comparison to standard test probes. This initial higher spring force guarantees reliable contact when the same load is reached the spring force is equal to that of the comparable standard test probe at working stroke. More information Rotating test probes Rotating test probes can provide a reliable alternative if contacting problems occur. A rotating movement during the stroke process scratches the surface to be contacted, which securely penetrates insulating layers, such as severe contamination or anodised aluminium. Bead Probe GKS So-called bead probes are used for contacting beads solder beads on printed circuit boards. Various tip styles are available for optimal testing of beads depending on their geometry, composition and surface. Fine pitch test probes Fine pitch test probes are used to contact very small test points in small grids. These are sometimes mounted without receptacles. Metric test probes Metric test probes metric standard supplement the classic ICT/FCT test probes without collars. They stand out due to their stability and robustness and all feature a pronounced collar. INGUN S-LineThe socketless series enables testing without receptacles. As a result, S-Line test probes fit in common grid sizes, despite being larger in diameter, and offer better mechanical durability. More information You are hereHomeBlogsRob Putala's blog September 11, 2014As manufacturing processes improve and circuitry has moved from discrete components to highly-integrated programmable components, effective test strategies must now place more emphasis on functional test rather than in-circuit test ICT.In-circuit test performs a “schematic verification” by testing individual components of a printed circuit board PCBA one at a time by comparison against a software model of some parameters of the component. It is not done “at speed” and does not verify interoperability but is very effective at finding manufacturing excels atLocating manufacturing defects such as solder shorts, missing components, wrong components, and open many tests without power applied to the device under test DUT, thus avoiding most conditions that could damage an test programming effort as the programming consists of concatenating software component models and switching test instruments onto each part via a bed-of-nails BON shortcomings areTest fixtures tend to be expensive due to the need for an electrical connection to each electrical node of the circuit. Hundreds of spring action pins pogo pins are often ICT does not test continuity through connectors, so connector faults are often not identified. Functional test FCT verifies that a PCB assembly functions properly by providing stimulus to an assembly and verifying the tests are designed to assure that circuitry functions within specifications. Testing is usually done “at speed” through DUT connectors and/or BON fixture. The number of pogo pins typically needed for a functional test fixture is significantly less than an ICT excels atIdentifying functional defects within a printed circuit board assemblyAssessing functionality while applying marginal power supply voltage and/or currentAppraising functionality of DUT while applying a range of input stimuli amplitudes or currentsDetermining DUT power consumption during operationUncovering problems with analog circuitry such asWrong oscillator frequencyAnalog signal clipping/distortionAmplifier gain or bandwidth issuesDrive currents of power output circuitsPotentiometer adjustment issuesRevealing issues with digital circuitry such asSignal timing design or component relatedCommunications problems Ethernet, DeviceNet, Serial, etcFCT shortcomings areTest programs require a thorough understanding of the DUT performance, thus programming costs are typically higher that ICT. But, graphical programming significantly reduces the cost to implement functional often utilizes high speed instrumentation to characterize signals from the DUT. High speed equipment is more expensive than instrumentation intended for low speed through connectors can cause reliability issues as connectors wear. Bloomy mitigates this with sacrificial interposer cables. Category Tags Rob Putala's blog

ict and fct test