Manufacturer adds power test and box build

A Prima Electronics Services product story

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team Jul 15, 2005

Cambridgeshire based contract manufacturer Prima Electronic Services has opened a new combined power test and box build facility at its facility in St Ives.

Cambridgeshire based contract manufacturer Prima Electronic Services has opened a new combined power test and box build facility at its facility in St Ives.

More and more customers are looking to reduce their costs by having contract manufacturers provide a full turnkey facility with box build and then ship directly to their customer base.

In order to be able to achieve this as a first step, a contractor has to have the confidence that the board it has built is capable of being tested for any manufacturing process defects.

Prima installed a Scorpion Flying probe tester about three years ago and the results have demonstrated that the first pass yields have increased to a figure close to 99% at this stage.

Following that, and before box build it is important to be able to test the boards for functionality and if necessary fault find and fix parametric faults rather than manufacturing defects.

Although Prima has always had this capability, part of this requirement needs to have the ability to test power supplies; and to this end Prima now offers an isolated keylocked facility with a 30A trip so as to provide safety for the people operating the test equipment.

Power testing, as an example, can be accomplished at exposed mains, 2kV AC and 400V DC.

In addition the department can deal with any programming needs before the "box" is finally assembled.

Adjacent to the test group, facilities exist to provide the final build of the finished products which vary from basestations to packaged evaluation kits, modules for integration into railway and truck cabs and many other applications.

In many cases the finished and tested products are packaged together with CDs manuals, cables, power supplies and other peripherals then drop shipped to the ultimate end user.

Prima can therefore now offer the full turnkey package or any part of it.