Flying-Probe Testing: A Trajectory Planner and a Benchmark Suite

The in-circuit test checks whether the board’s electrical and electronic components have been correctly soldered when producing printed circuit boards. When such a test is performed using a flying-probe tester, the cost of testing is mainly related to the time required for moving probes over the board and the time necessary for defining such movements, tuning the optimization on the number of devices that will eventually be tested. Since the 2000s, flying probe testing has been gaining popularity. Still, despite its industrial relevance, the research has been impaired by the lack of publicly available benchmarks for testing the new algorithms and comparing the different ideas. This paper presents an open test set of realistic boards, ranging from a few thousand to half a million test points, together with a tool for generating more samples. It also presents an optimizer for flying probe tests composed of two separate planners: one global detecting test that could be performed together and reordered to obtain a more efficient probing sequence, and one local, implementing the probe movements and taking care of specific board features. The test set will eventually be used to present a quantitative evaluation of the performance of the proposed approach.