Flying Probe: An Integral Test Method

摘要

With recent improvements in both software and hardware, flying probe test systems (Figure 1) have become popular for manufacturing verification of printed circuit boards (PCBs). Flying probes offer certain benefits and, accordingly, should be considered as part of an overall test strategy. The first generation of flying probes used the manufacturing defects analyzer (learn-and-com-pare) approach to test PCBs. This approach allowed for faster test program development because the value and tolerance data usually stored in the bill of materials (BOM) was not needed for program generation. Reasonably fast program generation and debug were possible, but fault coverage and test repeatability often suffered.