Test engineer

With this in mind, test engineers always gets involved in the following reviews as well...

* Schematics Review - to make sure all components and data/electrical paths are accessible and testable

* Board Layout Review - to make sure all labels and components are accessible. No components are near the edges, covers, movable parts, etc. that would result into higher probability of a components being knocked off the board.

* Electrical Specs Review - to make sure all we can drive the needed power into the board with any fixture needed in any of the process (ICT fixture needs to make sure it can supply the appropriate power to the board without external power supplies, the Burn-In and ESS chamber can provide the required voltage and current to a number of fixtures and at the same time without modifying the chambers specs so it can mix with other products)

Yield Gathering

Data gather plays a very important part during a products lifespan. In early stages, this data or test yields drives if a product is mature enough to go into mass production. Certain companies have specific yield targets for each process that measures what is the yields expected.

Data is also consistently gathered after the product gets passed mass production stage. This data is usually used to improve the quality of the products. For example, data may prove that common chips doesn't work well with the CPU or design of the product. It may also show that a particular field replaceable unit (FRU) fails a number of times in the field. Because of those data, a new component or FRU can be qualified by hardware, software and manufacturing team to drive down the errors or eliminate those problems. This data are provided as input also to the next product with similar design.

In addition, yields will show if another process needs to be introduced (i.e. previous process cannot capture certain test errors due to limitation of fixturing or something else). Yields can also decide if a needed process can be trimmed down or even fully eliminated (i.e. if the ESS errors can be captured during the 3rd hour, test time can be cut down from a normal 24 hours down to maybe 4. Or if a process consistently yields 100% during a 15 month period, teams can thoroughly decide to eliminate those process)

Test Automation

Test automation consumes the biggest part of the test engineers' role. The whole intention of automating the test is as follows:

    * Enforce test steps to be followed within specifications and correct timing.

    * Eliminates any manual handling of commands and data input.

    * Automate data gathering.

    * Enforce test process flows are executed.

Overall, this drives manufacturing quality at the end of the line making sure that all units shipped out to customers are well tested, stressed and filtered out any errors, and configured properly.

Copyright 2008 - France BtoB from Wikipédia