Concept Development and Implementation of a Flexible Functional PCB Test System

In Infineon Technologies Austria AG (IFAT), a crucial phase during the Integrated Circuit (IC) design process, consists in execute life tests and stress tests within the quality lab. In order to analyze the reliability of these devices, specific tests are used to simulate accelerated lifetime and worst case conditions. This process is both exploited during the design of new devices and during the qualification before the market release. As a part of Infineon Kompetenzzentrum Automobil- und Industrie-Elektronik (KAI) is involved in developing advanced stress test systems which can perform a wide range of tests. The main advantage of these test systems is their modularity, which allows to use the same hardware for testing a wide range of devices by just changing the board where the Device Under Test (DUT) is placed. The same control module is used in all these systems, in order to collect, filter, digitalize and provide the test output data to a required host computer. The aim of this thesis is to design an Automatic Functional Test Concept that can be applied to the modular test systems developed and currently under development in KAI. This test, which is able to recognize the possible after production faults and the ones will appear due to its use, need to be executable by the test engineer without knowing the system under test, providing to him understandable and meaningful result and analog measurement calibration data. The studied concept is then applied to a system under development in order to study its application and provide some example of its results. To proceed with the test implementation an analysis of the chosen system is provided and according to this an adapter Printed Circuit Board (PCB) is designed. Finally, the test plan is programmed and executed, the results are analyzed and described showing the advantages and drawbacks of the designed technique.