W.S.G. Isaac Newton

At Benchmark Almelo there is production and assembly for products used in the aerospace and semi-conductor industries. For these products, it is critical that they are assembled correctly and are fully functional. To assure this the Test Design Engineering team at Benchmark designs tester machines and writes tester software to automatically test all units that are shipped. Since every product has different interfaces (different connectors) a special adaption cable must be designed for each new product.

The internship focused on improving the design and design process of the creation of such a product adaption cable. An adaption cable for products for the tester that was the subject of the internship generally consists of 400 wires and the design is bound by the functional limitations of the tester and the specific tests that need to be performed. The tool that was made generates all required tests, the wiring design of the adaption cable, and the test lines that the test program for the tester can interpret based on input from an Excel sheet. This greatly reduces the time required to integrate a new product. The tool also tries to optimize the design of the mass interconnect interface (the connection between the adaption and the tester) to improve the manufacturability of this interconnect.