Test your power boards with SPEA.
Your electronics will work for decades, without failures.
For power electronic boards, every failure on the field can represent a huge cost, often interrupting essential services such as electricity and telecommunications. The possibility to test these products in a fully automated way, performing all the tests required with the same equipment, brings great competitive advantages to electronics manufacturers, who can eliminate the risk of failures in the field, while also saving on the cost of testing.
Applications such as electricity meters, solar and energy, are characterized by a unique combination of elements: they combine a variety of different technologies (digital boards, power boards, displays, communication, …) and are often called to work in tough environments, for many years. SPEA has a strong experience in testing these technologies: a large part of the electronics mounted in the electricity meters around Europe is tested on SPEA machines, as well as electronics of solar panels and electric vehicles. The reason to choose SPEA? On a production lot of 3 millions units, tested with SPEA, not a single failure occurred at the installation site.
Test challenges in today’s power electronics
Traditional test equipment for electronic boards – such as standard in-circuit testers, or flying probe testers – are 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, measured, managing this in full safety on products that include heating components and parts
However, the need to perform a complete parametric and functional test on these products, to verify their correct working and ensure their quality, is mandatory, and the costs of testing should be as little as possible, to reduce its impact on the product economics.
COMPLETE TEST
All electronic parts (either 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 inspection, flashing, RTC calibration can be performed on the same equipment used for electronic tests.
AUTOMATIC HANDLING OF LARGE BOARDS
SPEA testers can come equipped with in-line handling modules, which are able to automatically load the boards from their racks or directly from the SMT line, even if they are big-sized (1000x610mm), heavy (20kg), and mounting tall components (150mm).
FIELD RETURNS ARE PRACTICALLY ELIMINATED
The capability to catch every possible defect makes SPEA testers able to eliminate the occurrence of failures at functional testing, and to practically eliminate also the failures in the field for the final product, which often has a warranty period of 10 to 20 years.
