ABurnIn™ ... MultiUp, Unattended, Repetitive Testing


Oven Chamber, Burn-In Test At The Contract Manufacturer
Certain manufacturing strategies require that all products pass a lengthy, often stressful, test procedure before shipment. When an environmental oven, "hot tent", or "heated walk in room" is used, the test is often called, "Burn-In". Not all Anagon clients endorse this strategy. It's expensive and complicated. However, some believe that Burn-In will help ensure high product quality in the field.

Anagon gained much practical knowledge developing Burn-In systems for early clients. We found that testing multiple units at the same time was complex. We learned to test each unit before committing it to the oven. From this experience, we synthesized a general purpose, architectural base known as ABurnIn™. This intellectual property drastically reduces the cost of new developments.

Continuous Telecom BER Test Using A Walk-In "Hot Room"
ABurnIn™ provides a standard callback mechanism that allows the test engineer to develop individual, application-specific tests that "plug into" the overall architecture. Each callback performs a specific function: Connect, Download, Identify, QuickTest, FullTest, and Disconnect are typical examples.

Immediately above is the Burn-In control room at Yurie Systems, in Landover Maryland. You can see the walk-in hot room through the window, where 180 products can be burned in simultaneously. We integrated ABurnIn™ with ATM traffic generator instruments and used the Yurie network to route full bandwidth ATM traffic through each product. Each unit must pass 16 hours of errorless ATM traffic before reaching the customer.

A Typical ABurnIn™ Application Under Development At Anagon
Because Burn-In deals with many units at once, it is easy for low-skilled operators to become confused. BurnIn™ provides a graphical user interface that models the physical Burn-In space, so that operators can easily identify where specific units are and how each is performing. Immediately below is a configuration that models 3x2 units to a "shelf", 5 shelves to a "rack", and 3 racks to the "facility".

In this application, no external instruments are required. Instead, Anagon controls diagnostics built into each product and monitors progress through a serial port multiplexer. BurnIn™ uses a proprietary schema to record and archive detailed measurement data on each unit. ABurnIn™ also maintains a profiler that can trigger different tests based on time, temperature, and humidity.



Contact us for more info