Industry : Bio-Medical

Category : Software Development

The Challenge:

To develop a cost-effective test system for testing four different component boards in a PC-based ultrasound machine. The boards used proprietary hardware and software interfaces for communication with the machine and are mounted on a back-plane that provides a link between the various components. Each of the boards served a specific functionality and it was required to test these by feeding various (electrical) signals or (software) commands and verifying the outputs using instruments and software

Technology:

Hardware : PXI/Compact PCI, NI 5401- PXI Function Generator, NI 5112- PXI Oscilloscope
Software  : LabVIEW

The Solution:

Soliton architected a PXI based system running a customized LabVIEW application to address this requirement. The PXI based architecture was chosen because the PC was not a suitable option to handle the 4 cards very reliably and also due to its better suitability for the manufacturing environment

The system thus helped deliver reliable and repeatable measurements along with automatic report generation and easy to use visual aids to assist the users during the initial setup. With the ATE’s compactness and capability to test all the boards, two test lines managed the entire testing rather than four.

Engineering Challenges:

• Interfacing capability – To interface with the proprietary software, essentially used for communication between the ultrasound PC and the boards, FPGA and memory registers, board-level flash memory and data retrieval via the proprietary bus interfaces.
• Automatic switching – To automate the proprietary switching unit provided by the customer via a serial interface.
• Customized report generation - Generating customized test reports and making the manufacturing test information available over the Internet in a HTML format to different manufacturing locations.

Value Addition:

• Usability - The GUI provided Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) along with visual aids to guide the user.
• High throughput - The time taken to perform the testing was reduced from 3 hours to just 12 minutes including the initial connections.
• Productivity enhancement - From four people required full time to perform the testing , the system helped to improve the productivity significantly by requiring just one person to manage the two ATEs to meet the production targets. Human intervention was required just to make the initial connections.
• Cost reduction - The entire production throughput could be met with just two systems thereby saving 60% on the initial investments.

Commendation:

This application was adjudged 'The Winner' under the Life Sciences / Biomedical category in the NI Week 2003 Best Application Contest.
http://sine.ni.com/cs/app/doc/p/id/cs-455