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NEW approaches to age old problems01 May 2008When the team at National Electronics Week (NEW) approached me about writing a column for their newsletter I was, naturally, delighted. When they said it was to be about the UK test market, I was, surprisingly, still delighted. Why was it surprising that I should want to write such a column in the first place? Well throughout the peaks and troughs of the past decade in the electronics manufacturing industry, the test sector has sometimes seemed like a forgotten child. It has stood accused of being a flat market, and therefore an unexciting one. But this underplays the significance of the test function.
The debate goes back 25 years to a time when a small independent publisher decided, to considerable ridicule I am told, that the electronics test market and the electronics manufacturing market should be treated as one and the same, and Electronics Manufacture & Test was born. EM&T still exists in the UK and I am lucky enough to be the editor of it. Remember, this was an era when the black arts of such disciplines as wave soldering and test programming were inherently closed to all but the inner circle. So while the ridicule was perhaps understandable, the long term vision of an industry where efficient production was inter-dependent on the test function has to be commended (long before I was involved in EM&T, so I am not trying to claim any of the credit!)
The passing of these 25 years has seen the divide between test and production shrink, and in many cases disappear, partly thanks to the vast improvements made in the interfaces to these machines and the consequent ease and uniformity of programming. While there has always been the option of including ATE, MDA or even functional test as an inline part of the process, it has really only been with the advent of Automatic Optical Inspection (AOI) that we have a truly dynamic test component in an automated line. However, even AOI can take a bit more time and expertise to set-up for a new product than the other modules in the line.
The AOI part of the test market, which is also now being enthusiastically followed by the Automatic X-ray Inspection (AXI) sector, is therefore far from flat. I suspect, however, the reason why you don’t hear too much about the success of these sectors of the market is that they are so heavily diluted. In the Inspection section of ’The ShortList’, you will find no fewer than 39 vendors and around 150 machines. While some of these vendors are more prominent than others, that is an awful lot of suppliers for the new, ‘streamlined’ electronics manufacturing industry. Many of these vendors will be represented at the National Electronics Week, some direct from the suppliers, but many more through their local distributors. If you are new to this technology it is worth trawling round the stands to see the huge differences in capabilities and prices.
I suspect the reason why the more traditional parts of the test market are apparently flat is that the test solution is often not an off-the-shelf product. In the good old days, everyone had a dozen surface mount lines and a shiny new Genrad, Agilent, Teradyne or Marconi tester at the end of it. These were typically bed-of-nails testers that served high-volume lines making long-running products. Quick changeovers and fixture costs were not considerations. Nowadays the reverse is true and the role of the traditional ATE (particularly in countries like the UK where volumes are lower) has become more restricted in favour of functional test. More often than not, a functional test solution will be either a bespoke solution or a combination of hardware and software from multiple vendors - not an off-the-shelf solution, and difficult to quantify in terms of market intelligence. For example, if one company supplies a PXI chassis, two more provide instruments, and yet another is a system integrator (and therefore both customer and supplier), who gets the credit for the final test system?
Because of this fragmentation, rather than the market being flat, my impression is that most suppliers are doing good, steady business across a range of products; but nothing is the sort of runaway success that makes the headlines. All the time, more is being asked of these suppliers; nobody wants to buy a machine anymore. Everyone wants to buy a solution and it has been incumbent on the suppliers to get to a level of technical expertise that enables them to visualise, specify and commission what the customer needs.
While the supplier is under more pressure to deliver, so too the test engineer has to retain a level of technical ability that can easily be lost in the rest of the production line (on account of the vast improvements of production equipment). In fact, in this column back in July '07, I put forward the theory that the most creative engineers existed in test departments (Creative engineers found alive and well…). My electronic postbag afterwards suggested that this was not true, but then it came mainly from production engineers!
To conclude, the test market remains a critical part of the electronics manufacturing industry. The importance of getting a product right at an earlier stage in the production process increases as more manufacturing goes offshore as soon as the pre-production stage is concluded. So the role of test increases at prototype stage, remains vital during production, and provides the only guarantee of quality from outsourced product.
The test market is far from flat. Contact Details and Archive...Related Articles...Most Viewed Articles... |
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