Power Electronic Board Test
In-Circuit and Functional Tests Detect Power Electronic Board Defects
Power electronic boards play a vital role in transforming and delivering power to electronic devices. Every board component’s failure can represent a huge cost, often interrupting essential services such as electricity and telecommunications.
While power electronic boards vary in complexity and size, they typically all include power devices such as inverters, power supplies, power drivers, or frequency converters combined with different technologies (digital boards, power boards, displays, …) that are often called to work in tough environments for many years.
Testing power electronic boards has become indispensable to ensure the performance of the power components that often dictate the efficiency, safety, and reliability of the entire final product.
Test challenges in today’s power electronics
With the growing advancement in technology, power components are expected to become smaller in size with more efficiency. However, most capacitors, inductors, and transformers on the market are big in size as their capacity increases if the size becomes larger.
Traditional test equipment for electronic boards is not an option for testing a large part of power electronic boards, since they are not able to deal with several characteristics of these products:
- These boards are large, tall, and heavy, due to the presence of big components such as condensers, coils, metallic heat sinks, and stiffeners
- They often include mixed technologies on the same circuit boards, such as SMT, TH, Pressfit
- They require high power performance: high current and high voltage have to be sourced and measured, managing this in full safety on products that include heating components and parts
Additionally, testing that all voltage/current values of the power components are working and are compliant with their specifications might imply the use of several dedicated instrumentations, such as a multimeter, relay matrix, and DC generators, resulting in longer, inaccurate, and incomplete testing procedures.
Power electronic boards’ automatic test reduces defects and costs
The possibility to perform combined in-circuit and functional tests on power electronic boards to verify their correct functioning is critical in high-volume productions where accuracy, high throughput, and low costs are key requirements.
SPEA has designed automatic test equipment devoted to eliminating any possibility of error in power electronic boards, performing complete tests in a fully automatic way.
SPEA dedicated automatic in-circuit testers and flying probe testers perform a comprehensive range of test techniques on electronic boards with big power components and detect, with a single machine, all the defects, eliminating the risk of field returns.
All electronic parts (digital, analog, power) are fully tested – e.g. executing high-voltage test, supercapacitor test, polarity test, relay test – and also mechanical parts such as magnets, LEDs, and displays. Moreover, additional operations such as optical test and flashing can be performed on the same equipment used for electronic tests.
Executing different tests simultaneously of increasingly complex power electronic boards ensures proper circuit operation. SPEA automatic test equipment combines in-circuit and functional tests, on a single automatic tester, helping electronic boards manufacturers to overcome testing challenges.