Hi guys,
due to my job of repairing all kind of marine and industrial electronic boards I´m going to buy an IC tester. I´ve been checking some from China and I´m looking for a complete one (digital and analog devices) spending around 300€ as a maximum (that is my idea).
Do you have some good recommendation?
Regards.
Hi,
Yes i have a recommendation, dont buy one
Seriously, usually an IC tester will be for some specific IC, specific family of IC's, or an application specific IC that happens to be used in some company somewhere and they found that it would be advantageous to production to have one or more IC testers for the specific set of IC's they use in their products.
So when you say, "...all kinds of boards", you would really have to research this out and find what kinds of chips they use and then maybe you could find a set of testers that would do all of them. This depends so much on the nature of the boards and the IC's that they use that it is just impossible to recommend anything without knowing the full product line.
When i worked in the industry i designed two (or more) testers for a specific product line for use in fast production testing. The testers were only for a few different boards yet they had specific details about them that any run of the mill tester could NEVER predict what would be required for testing because of some of the intricate details of the individual boards.
The only possibility i can think of would be a programmable tester, that could be programmed to test for various criteria like rise time, delay time, etc., but i dont imagine that would be too cheap. There would also be some mechanical issues such as making contact with the correct test points, sockets, etc.
So you see it would be very expensive to design something that could test everything or at least most things, but if you narrow your product range then you can think about designing something yourself perhaps.
Another quick example would be that some test point may be required to exhibit a certain waveform for a given input stimulus. You'd need a scope in addition to a general test set.
Every manufacturer i ever worked for built their own 'jigs' for testing individual products quickly mostly because there's nothing except a human that can test everything, and only then with the right general test equipment and procedures