Mindspeed

Mindspeed Technologies™, the Internet Infrastructure business of Conexant, is one of the leading semiconductor companies providing the foundational elements of today's and tomorrow's network infrastructure products.

Their requirement was for several test fixtures to allow accelerated life testing of packaged circuits in an environmental chamber.

Three designs were commissioned each for a different IC variant with a set of 8 test boards per device so that a total of 480 devices of each type could be tested at once. Attention to assembly techniques was crucial due to the environment - some tests are run at 125 degrees centigrade and 90% humidity.

One of the eight test boards

Our involvement was with the electronic and mechanical design of the test fixtures to hold the parts under test and the small-scale manufacture of these assemblies. The project was completed successfully.

Following on from this, the customer requested a redesign of the "driver board" - the control system for the test. The design involved generation of a 1Mhz clock with variable amplitude and offset from ground, a demultiplexer / clock recovery circuit and a micro-controlled "fault detector". Five of these units were supplied and are in use in their test facility.

Mindspeed - Leading semiconductor company