Cal-Bay Systems

Automated Test Equipment

Cal-Bay can support your products’ test requirements from design validation through production testing that will help you deliver products to the market faster, at a lower cost and ensure quality.

Whether you need to test an RF amplifier, heart pacemaker, or generic printed circuit board, Cal-Bay can offer you an automated test solution to replace often tedious manual procedures and defined to suit your budget and maximize return on investment. Cal-Bay has extensive experience developing automated test solutions for the semiconductor, medical device and RF R&D and manufacturing industries.

Cal-Bay offers a wide range of services for automated test solutions

Specification Development
Technical Consulting
Software Development
Turnkey Systems
Installation Services
Training

Cal-Bay is in a unique position to leverage its expertise in a wide range technologies like computer vision, motion control, PC-based instrument control etc. to give you the most effective test solution.

Production Testing

Cal-Bay can provide production test solutions that add value by:

Maximizing product throughput by minimizing test time through efficient software and state-of-the-art hardware. Cal-Bay and reducing setup time by designing and building custom fixtures, if necessary.
Eliminating sampling. Automated production testing will allow testing of 100% of your production
Complying with often complex industry and government regulations like the FDA 21 CFR Part 11 for medical devices
Addressing unique requirements of production testing like separate operator and engineer logins and test screens

Design Validation Testing

Cal-Bay’s design validation test solutions can help you identify problems early in your product development lifecycle. We understand that you need flexibility at this stage of testing. Our test solutions will allow your Design Engineer to create and modify test sequences and fine tune test parameters.

Adding value and reducing cost in automated test systems

Test software, test system troubleshooting and diagnosis and calibration are some of the biggest challenges facing manufacturers. Cal-Bay can supply solutions that will lower cost of ownership in these areas.

Test Software Costs and NI TestStand

Standardization and reuse of automated test software can create tremendous cost savings for our customers. Many software tasks are common to all automated test systems, for example:

Control Test Sequencing and looping through tests
Comparison of Test Results to Pass / fail limits
Storing, reporting and managing test data
Operator Log-in, tracking and management

TestStand, a test management environment for automating test systems, allows reuse of the same software for these tasks, reducing test software development costs for our customers.

Lower Total Cost of Ownership – Self-Test and Diagnostics

A set of interconnected test instruments is capable of performing self-test and diagnostics. Cal-Bay has integrated this functionality into its standardized test platform - the FTS-200. Traditionally a test system is checked or validated with a known good device or unit under test, often called a “Golden” DUT or UUT. There are many advantages of the self-test and diagnostics approach over the Golden DUT approach:

Instruments can be tested across their full operating range; false passes can be detected as well as false failures
All test equipment functionality is tested, not just what is exercised by a particular DUT
Potentially better fault diagnosis because Self-Test software is focused on testing instrument subsystems rather than DUT subsystems

The Self-Test and Diagnostics software will provide a user interface and report detailing the status of each instrument in the Tester. The software will also flag any out-of-tolerance conditions. A user interface will display the failed parameter(s), tolerance(s), and failed value(s). This information will also be written to a report and text file.

Calibration Costs and System-Level Calibration

We can also create system-level calibration capability to perform calibration checks on all instruments in the system using automated calibration software, compliant with ANSI Standard Z540. Calibration is achieved without removing instruments from the system. System-level calibration will confer the following features and benefits:

Calibration of system instruments without removal of the instruments from the test system. This reduces down time and the risk of breaking the systems as instruments are removed and reinstalled.
Reduced setup time for calibration.
Reduced labor costs.
Reduced Test System downtime.
Lower capital costs because a spare set of instruments are not required for swapping in or out of the ATE.
Improved true accuracy because calibration is conducted closer to DUT.
Simplified asset tracking because instruments will not generally need to moved around from system to system.

The FTS-200 and HR-RFSW are two examples of systems for automated test that we have developed and perfected over the years.

FTS-200 - Functional Test System - a general-purpose test platform for high-mix and low-volume automated testing. This general purpose test system can be used for a wide range of products with similar characteristics. It minimizes idle time by providing connectivity for rapid changeover between DUTs.

HR-RFSW - High-Reliability RF Switch Matrix - a custom switch matrix for RF applications and high-bandwidth automated test systems