DMC collaborated with the client’s engineering staff to design, develop, and implement the improved advanced burn-in test fixture for active optical devices. The end system was smaller, easier to use, and cheaper. The cost benefit has been realized as the customer has built identical test systems to further increase capacity.
Burn-in testing is performed on finished components and involves performing full operational testing over temperature limits to screen out latent failures. The improved system is based on National Instruments’ PXI platform. DMC programmed a custom LabVIEW application to control all functions of the test station including querying part-number specific information from a database, configuring each device channel based on part number, controlling the ambient temperature of the test fixtures, actively operating each device using a feedback-loop control routine, recording all device operating parameters to an XML file, performing pass/fail analysis on parts at test completion, and logging all final test results to an Oracle database. System specifications include the ability to actively test up to 32 devices in parallel, setup and run devices in groups of 8, achieve a 75% reduction of setup time by loading devices without unspooling of optical fiber, a novel optical system to eliminate spurious power fluctuations, and reduced station cost of 50% through leveraging COTS (Commercial Off the Shelf) test system components.