European Circuits have been delighted to work with Copernicus Technology Limited with the development of the Printed Circuit Board Assembly for their Intermittent Fault Emulator (IFE) for the National Centre for Manufacturing Sciences (NCMS) in the USA.
1CTL visited NCMS and United States Department of Defense (US DoD)
staff at Naval Air Station Lakehurst, New Jersey in late August to deliver the IFE operator training course.
NCMS has procured IFEs from CTL for the US Navy and the US Air Force, and the US DoD will be using the IFEs to validate No Fault Found test equipment with intermittent fault detection capability.
As part of their work to tackle No Fault Found the US DoD is compiling a Military performance standard which testers used to find intermittent faults will need to meet. In due course the IFEs will be used to evaluate testers against that performance document.
2CTL’s original de
sign for a 128 channel intermittent fault simulation system provided the starting point for development of the NCMS-specification IFE. The IFE was then successfully verified, independently, by the No Fault Found research project team from the Cranfield University-based EPSRC Through-life Engineering Services research centre. The resulting IFE features 256 test channels on which it can generate combinations of random or user-defined ohmic variations as simulated individual or burst ‘faults’ on any test channel, and with ‘fault’ durations from nanoseconds to milli-seconds.
Copernicus was very pleased with the input and support from European Circuits and the quality of the finished product from us. In turn, Copernicus’s customer was also delighted with the performance and user-friendliness of the IFE and the team at NCMS are now planning which test equipment types will be evaluated using the IFEs. The NCMS-specification of IFE is now available to purchase from CTL, and customer-specification IFEs can also be designed and built to order.