Adapter including solid body

Details Adapter including solid body Adapter including solid body

1996-01-11

1999-11-02

Nguyen, Vinh P.

Electricity: measuring and testing

Fault detecting in electric circuits and of electric components

Of individual circuit component or element

324755, G01R 3102

Patent

active

059777869

DESCRIPTION:

BRIEF SUMMARY
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION

A present invention relates to an adapter for adapting a uniform contact grid of an electronic testing device for testing PCBs (printed circuit boards) to an irregular contact configuration of contact points on a PCB to be tested.
A "universal adapter" in accordance with EP-B1 26 824 has a base plate lying on a base grid of a testing device, which is provided with channels or bores which pass through it corresponding to a uniform contact grid of the testing device. At a distance above the base grid concerned, that is on a side of the base plate facing away from the base grid of the testing-device, there is an arrangement of two spaced-apart adapter plates, disposed or positioned by fixed spacing means. These adapter plates are identically provided with bores which are distributed corresponding to variably disposed connection points of a PCB to be tested. Needle-like test pins, which are resilient longitudinally, are inserted into these bores in the adapter plates. These test pins are able to pivot resiliently outwards, at least in their lower section, transverse to a lengthwise direction of the test pins, thus to offset any defects of alignment between the testpiece-specific bores and the grid of the testing device connected channels. With such an adapter made up of several plates, a manufacturer of PCBs must prepare at least the testpiece-specific adapter plates for each test series, in order to be able to assemble an adapter at all. Thus, rationalization for production of adapters is, to this extent, not possible.
As many thousands of connection points can be provided in complex PCBs, and a resilient test pin is needed for each connection point, costs for such an adapter rise markedly with increase in the number of contact points, since test pins that are resilient in the longitudinal direction require production costs that are not inconsiderable. In addition, such test pins have a minimum practical diameter that represents a natural limit for the possible density of the test pins.
In order to be able to use test pins that are rigid in the longitudinal direction and that thus are easy to manufacture to be particularly thin, an "active base grid" has been produced in which contacts of the base grid of a PCB testing device are resiliently supported essentially in the direction of the longitudinal axis of the test pins. This active base grid is applied onto the rigid, hard-wired base grid of the PCB testing device and serves, when rigid test pins are used, to provide sufficiently high contact pressure which is as uniform as possible at all test points contacted by the rigid test pins.
EP-A1-0 215 146 shows an adapter ("adapter 85") having an upper testpiece-specific bored adapter plate that lies on a PCB to be tested and rigid contourless test pins that pass through an additional elastic mat disposed at a distance below the PCB. The elastic mat is unbored and, because of the elasticity of material of the mat, prevents falling out of the test pins during handling with the adapter concerned, independently of the actual testing device. In this way, upon subsequent testing of identical PCBs, the labor costs of fitting the adapter with test pins, which costs are not inconsiderable, can be saved. Such adapter can be stored again until it is again used. Such adapter has the advantage that rigid, completely contourless test pins, which can be manufactured very cheaply, can be used, although fitting of the adapter becomes more complicated in that the test pins cannot simply "drop into" the adapter, but rather have to be pushed through the unbored elastic mat with a certain force. This adapter furthermore has an inner adapter plate, a grid of which, however, corresponds neither to the grid of the outer adapter plate or to the grid of the base plate. This therefore means that it is necessary to manufacture at least one further adapter plate with a bore pattern which differs from that of a first-mentioned adapter-plate, in addition to the testpiece-specific bored adapter plate.
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