Improving power supply reliability at a reduced cost using test automation and data management

In today´s increasingly competitive power supply market, designers are forced to consistently strive towards smaller more reliable designs at the lowest cost possible. One of the methods available to help achieve these sometimes conflicting requirements is to design testability directly into the product. As the trend towards smaller distributed power continues to press forward, the volumes for these power supplies has been increasing dramatically. This has forced designers and test engineers to follow concurrent engineering practices in order meet the goals of the highest reliability at the lowest cost. Customer value must remain the predominant goal of any corporation in order to remain economically viable into the future. It is the goal of this paper to give a general overview of traditional versus automated testing of power supplies. As a study case of the testing trends in use today, a presently implemented automatic test equipment (ATE) facility is reviewed. This ATE fully exploits the convergence of software, hardware and high-power programmable test equipment. Also discussed is the associated test data management which maintains product reliability at a reduced cost