Month: March 2012

HPDCA – In Circuit Test (ICT) – Machine Monitoring System

By Agilent In Circuit Test, HP In Circuit Test, HP3070, ICT, IFR In Circuit Test, IFR4220, Machines Monitoring, Machines Monitoring Systems, WEB APPS

NS-HPDCA

If you are in EMS (Electronics Manufacturing Services) business, you know how important is to have a good test solution for all your products.
A common test solution is In-Circuit Test and also you might have:

  • Visual Inspection,
  • AOI (Automatic Optical Inspection),
  • X-RAY,
  • Functional Test,
  • and many more.

ICT (In-Circuit Test) is many times a basic requirement for PCBA’s testing.
Test solution has to be properly designed and deployed in order to give you a good test coverage.

Once you have it designed, deployed, validated, you need to get under control the messages from the ICT machines.

ICT machine prints a docket for each failed PCBA and also creates log files, where tests results and measurement are recorded/logged.

It’s all good to have the data saved in the log files, but when you need to analyse a large amount of information from the log files you need a tool that will help you extract and organise this data.

Scripts, OEM software tools have been made available, but quite often these tools were expensive and not really designed for engineering needs.

HPDC (HP Data Collector) Inception

I’ve had the same issue as many others, had data available in the log files, but it was so damn hard to get them out of there and make them useful, meaningful, summarised in a good report.

For example, many time I’ve questioned myself:

  • Which are the top 10 ICT failures for a specific product (real time, would be nice)?
  • What’s the average test time for a product?
  • What’s the average measurement for a specific test?
  • What’s ICT loading/utilisation?
  •  What’s the ICT yield (the real one)?
  • How many times the boards are tested (number of retests)?
  • Are going out to the customers only boards that passed ICT?
  • The right ICT program has been used to test the PCBAs?
  • What should I do with a fail board if the fail docket is missing? Do I have to test it again when failure data are available somewhere (log file)?

I couldn’t find too much help checking available solutions from ICT manufacturers like HP (Agilent), IFR (Marconi), Genrad and then I’ve started thinking how can I do it?

HPDC – What it does?

HPDC is a file parser – it opens log files, from ICT Machines like HP3070, IFR4220, takes relevant information from them, and sends the information to a MySQL database.

Now that data is nicely organised, in a MySQL database purposely built for easy access, creating reports should be an easy task.

HPDA (HP Data Analyzer) – What it does?

HPDA is a software solution developed to interpret data collected by HPDC, bring them closer to you, make them useful.
Through comprehensive reports, this software is capable to present a holistic image of your ICT testers.

  • Need to know yields, top defects, retest, cycle time – you’ll have them in a sec.
  • Need to know ICT machines utilisation – done in a sec.
  • Need to see more specific failure report or failures related to a specific serial number or do paperless debug – no worries.
  • Need to know if a board was pass or fail last time when it was tested, or if that board was tested using the right program – too easy.

The whole bunch of log files data at your fingertips, that’s useful.
If you want to find more about HPDC & HPDA or ICT data collection/collectors in general check the web page linked below:
https://nicks-software.com/exp/NS-HPDC-ICT-Data-Collector-and-Analyser.php

Or contact me.

Have fun playing with your ICT machines…

Cheers,
Nick