The
latest consumer electronics devices provide functionality unheard of
a few years ago. For example, cameras now feature wireless LAN functionality
for immediately uploading images from the camera to the Internet via
a Wi-Fi hotspot - no cables required. A cell phone today is a phone,
camera, music system and computer rolled into one.
This diversity, along with increased
market pressure, breeds varying implementation details, rapidly changing
requirements, increasing complexity and decreasing time available for
design cycles. Hence today’s product development cycle requires
a flexible test platform to deliver reliable measurements from prototype
to manufacturing. These platforms should combine sophisticated industry-leading
software with the latest precision measurement hardware to deliver high-performance.
One of the worlds’ largest EMS
(electronic manufacturing service) companies who manufactures and assembles
LCD modules for one of the leading cell phone manufacturers in the world,
required an automated test system for their cell phone LCD assembly.
The test system was required to perform
functional tests on all the parts of the LCD assembly, such as LCD screen,
LCD screen back light, speaker, magnet,microphone and a RTC battery,
while also building a single platform to perform different types of
tests required in just 14 days.
They had to test a new model of LCD
assembly for which they had to establish a test system that required
higher rates of testing and more reliability and traceability than its
existing manual testing. Hence, they wanted a single test station that
would test all the functional parts of the system, fully automated,
highly reliable, and meet their production requirement by lowering the
test time. They clearly wanted the system to be flexible to add any
test required at a later stage and also to easily adapt the test station
to a newer model of LCD display if required at a later stage, thus protecting
their investments.
To meet the above mentioned requirements
of their customer, Senthil Raj Desappan and team of Apna Technologies
& Solutions built a challenging solution. They created an automated
test system for the cell phone LCD assembly. The team developed a highly
reliable and flexible test system using the National Instruments PXI
platform with image acquisition (IMAQ) module for LCD screen inspection,
digital I/O module to generate necessary patterns for LCD testing, analog
output for exciting the microphone, analog input module for testing
RTC battery, speaker and screen backlight (using current consumption).
The flexible and reliable PXI platform
was chosen to provide the flexibilities the customer was seeking. Off-the-shelf
hardware and powerful software tools from National Instruments, such
as NI LabVIEW and NI TestStand, helped the team build the functional
tester for the client in less than two weeks.
Developing a test system with PXI Apna
Technologies & Solutions developed a highly reliable and flexible
test system using the NI
....CONTD
