ELECTRONICS TESTING IN PERSPECTIVE, PITFALLS AND A REALISTIC APPROACH

摘要

Much time and expense are expended in testing automotive electronic products to validate robustness to today's usage environment. Unfortunately many of today's test plans miss the mark. The typical test plan is reliability based, uses a cook book approach, requires large sample size and looks for catastrophic failure. While this was appropriate 20 years ago when product electronics was not complex and the components were unreliable, this is not the case today where the opposite is true. This paper shows many of the pitfalls inherent in today's typical test plans (non-EMC). More importantly, it shows a test planning approach & methodology that addresses today's design verification issues. Its attributes are: more relevancy to contemporary concerns, emphasis on functionality issues, customization of test plans, determination of design margins, extensive continuous in-test monitoring, small sample size, and overall test time reduction.