Faults on specific boards are located, diagnosed and repaired on paperless Repair Stations. Fault location and diagnosis are speeded up by accessing cross-linked intelligent board layout and circuit schematics graphics and a historical fault catalog.Standard and customized tabular and graphical reports on fault causes, responsible process steps,etc. can be generated on stations where the Report module is installed, ensuring that steps that generate faults are fixed and guaranteeing overall process improvement. Administrative data (e.g. fault causes, fault codes, process steps and repair actions respecting in house conventions) can be entered and edited on stations where the Maintenance module is installed.
Failure Importer
QMAN's Failure Importer automatically collects failure data logged by networked test systems in an ASCII failure protocol file or via a serial V24 interface. The failure data is validated with respect to grammar files, which can be modified to support tester upgrades with additional or enhanced test types and can be easily adapted to support different testers. Failure messages are interpreted, assigned to the correct board identifiers and stored in the QMAN database, eliminating paper failure tickets. When visual inspection is carried out manually on the production line, failure data can be entered manually on a QMAN Paperless Repair Station.
Trend Alarms. The Failure Importer monitors failures in real time for persistent errors. Upper limits can be set for failures on given boards, on specific failure types or even on failures reported by a specific tester station. If the failure rate exceeds the limits QMAN automatically generates trend alarms. These alarms are dispatched electronically to manufacturing managers and supervisors who can act to stop the production of more faulty boards. Any network station running the Monitoring module can receive trend alarms.
Paperless Repair Workstation
Reading failure data, locating fault sites, and identifying their causes .Board identifiers are read by a barcode reader and the corresponding failure data is loaded from failure database server. The barcode can be changed on the Repair Station and duly logged in accordance with ISO 9000 requirements. Hot-linked graphical board layout and circuit schematics locate the site of the reported failure. The causes of faults, for example defective component pins, components mounted at incorrect rotations and missing components, are identified using the layout and schematics graphics plus component information, net information and a historical fault catalog listing the causes of previous faults of the same kind.
Board layout and circuit schematics graphics. When there is a component failure, the faulty component is automatically marked by a cross cursor both in the board layout graphics and in the circuit schematics graphics. This makes it easy for the repair station user to view the electrical environment of the faulty component and facilitates failure diagnosis. In addition a component can be selected and displayed by entering its name. Labels, test and repair instructions and drawings can be added to the schematics to assist subsequent searches and failure diagnosis. When there is a short, the tracks belonging to the shorted nets are displayed and highlighted. When there is an open, the affected track is highlighted. Searching for shorts is speeded up by a feature that displays critical locations on the board where the tracks belonging to the shorted nets are particularly close. Tracks on different board layers can be displayed in different colors to simplify detection of fault locations on multilayer boards. Information on all items on the board (e.g. component position, tracks belonging to a net, position and number of tester pins on each net) and full component information (e.g. component pin assignments and other parameters) stored in the component database (CDB) can also be displayed. The board layout and circuit schematics graphics include a zoom function, and the circuit schematics graphics include a function for scrolling between different schematics pages.
Fault cause, responsible process and repair action logging. The true cause of every fault is logged on the Repair Station after a successful repair action has been taken, together with the step in the process responsible for the fault and the repair action that corrects it. Fault types, fault codes, process steps and repair actions are all user-configurable to respect in-house conventions. All of the fault and repair data that is entered, including free text giving more detailed information on repair actions, is stored in the QMAN database. To facilitate subsequent statistical analysis of free text entries the Repair Station checks that they only contain “regular expressions” (e.g. component names entered in a normalized format).
Fault catalog. The Fault Catalog contains all previous causes of a failure and is updated after a successful repair action. If, for example, the test system reports that the component R1 is faulty, but the failure diagnosis shows that component C1 is the true cause of the failure, the information on the true cause is stored in the Fault Catalog. If the same fault message is logged again by the test system during a later test, the user can benefit from the information in the Fault Catalog and carry out the required repair action much more quickly. A major advantage of using the Fault Catalog is that a failure can be diagnosed one time only even when the failure occurs on multiple boards that are processed on different repair stations.
Configuration as station for independent diagnosis and repair. A Paperless Repair Station can be configured so that fault diagnosis and repair are carried out by the same operator or independently, for example with fault diagnosis by engineers and specified repair actions executed by operators.
Reporting Module
Stations equipped with the Reporting module help manufacturing and quality managers to control processes more effectively and to achieve higher levels of quality assurance. They access the QMAN database to extract statistics on fault causes and the process steps that are responsible for them during a specified time period or time periods.
Comprehensive standard and custom reports can be output as tables or as graphs (bar charts, pie charts, etc. using integrated Microsoft Graph). For example, it is possible to carry out an indepth evaluation of a particular process, to compare the relative performance of different processes, to determine how often a given failure type has occurred in a given batch or batches, and to determine how often a particular component has been faulty. The Reporting module can access both the active QMAN database and archived QMAN databases.
Maintenance Module
Stations equipped with the Maintenance module are used to manage the QMAN software and the QMAN database. Features include: • Setup new users, workstations, and manufacturer codes
• Definition of fault types, fault codes, fault causes, responsible processes, board types, and fixture names
• Deletion of board types, batches and UUTs (with optional deletion of PASS UUTs only)
• Database consistency check
• Check for “tested, but never repaired boards”
• Access fault history of returned boards
• Export of whole active database, board types, lots, and UUTs to an archive database for backup purposes or for access by standard applications (e.g. the Reporting module)
• Import of archived database, board types, batches, and UUTs
• Import of single boards types from archive database
• Manual editing of database entries
• Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Desktop Engine (or MSDE 2000 freeware limited to 4 GB database and 20 million datalogs).
|
