What is PCBA Test in Mobile?

Old people often say that opium is the greatest harm in the 19th century, and mobile phones are cancer that plagues young people in the 21st century. The emergence of smartphones is undoubtedly the product of technological progress, and with the popularization of such electronic products, everyone, whether a child or an old man, has one. As far as electronic products such as cell phones are concerned, what I am most impressed with is the Samsung explosion. With the advancement of mobile phone PCBA testing technology, the probability of such accidents is becoming smaller and smaller.

Printed circuit board (PCB) is an indispensable part of modern electronic products, and it also plays an important role in mobile phones. These PCB boards are the carriers of electronic components and take on the role of electrical connections. In order to ensure that the mobile phone PCBA used to perform functions can operate normally, mobile phone manufacturers usually require PCBA processing plants to conduct strict quality tests during the manufacturing and assembly process. These tests are considered necessary, and mobile phone printed circuit board assembly (PCB) testing is considered the most important step in quality control throughout the production process. As it determines the product’s final performance. This article FS Technology will show you its importance and process from the perspective of manufacturers.

Explanation and introduction of mobile phone PCBA test

PCBA test in mobile phones refers to the electrical conductivity and input-output-based testing of PCBA boards. In the designing phase of mobiles, PCBA tests take place on different PCBs with Electronic Components, along with different test points having some numeric relationship i-evoltage and current.

Improper PCBA in mobile can cause malfunctioning of different electronic components or equipment, due to this reason it is very important to perform PCBA testing in mobile during the development phase. This also ensures whether the developed PCBA meets desired specifications and requirements efficiently or if there are some errors present.

Importance of PCBA Test in Mobiles

After understanding what PCBA test in mobiles is, it is important to know, why is it important to do. In fact, no matter what brand of mobile phone you use, these mobile phone manufacturers will conduct strict testing procedures before mass production, such as: mobile phone PCBA test, finished product test, current test, etc. These tests are considered significant. Following are some reason which depicts its importance:

Optimize Efficiency: PCBA test in mobiles allows mobile manufacturers to make their models more efficient and reliable without any quality-related issues.
Avoid Device Failure: By doing PCBA testing in mobile, one can identify the faults and defects in PCBA, which could eventually lead to malfunctioning of mobile and such failure can result in some serious threat to well-reputed mobile manufacturer firms. PCB-related mobile phone failures include: circuit board short, component burnout, current thermal noise, etc. To avoid such unwanted circumstances there is a need to do PCBA tests on mobiles.
Test individual performance of PCBA circuit board components in mobile: PCBA comprises different electronics components mounted on PCB, and PCBA tests also test each component if it is faulty or not. It is also considered that PCBA testing is also very crucial to test PCBA at component level to check better conductivity, nominal current and voltage rating, and even solder-ability of PCB.
Optimize Device Safety: Nowadays, mobile phones are a daily-based use device, therefore it is important to create a mobile, safety optimized device. Fortunately, proper PCBA testing also improves PCBA safety to the optimal level in the best possible way.

There are some other important factors that show the importance of PCBA testing in mobile, as jotted below:

Ensuring customer satisfaction
Reduced number of return products to mobile manufacturers
Avoid common PCB problems and reduce waste
Enhance profit margin
Improve reputation

Cell Phone PCBA test failure cases

There was once an excellent Chinese mobile phone brand – Smartisan, but it was cast aside due to its quality problems. These quality problems include two aspects: mobile phone finished assembly and electronic component problems. Here we mainly focus on the failure of the Smartisan mobile phone PCBA test:

Key failure:

The function provider of electronic products is the PCBA board. When the user touches/presses the button, the signal transmission cannot be accurately transmitted to the circuit board, and the final result is that the button fails. Looking at the essence through the appearance, the reason for this kind of failure is probably due to the lack of mobile phone PCBA function test or finished product press test.

Phone heats up:

With the increase of mobile phone functions, many big-brand mobile phones (iPhone, Huawei, Xiaomi) are facing heating problems, but Hammer mobile phones are particularly serious. The phenomenon of mobile phone heating is usually caused by reasons such as high load on the battery, CPU, and damage to internal components. In fact, in order to prevent unexpected errors, Hammer Company conducted a small sample test before mass production, but the unreliable third-party inspection structure did not find the issue of improper use of PCBA. If we conduct a relatively complete mobile phone circuit board test, we can find a solution immediately, and use HDI PCB, IMS PCB to replace the original solution to solve this problem.

Role of PCBA in Mobile’s Evolution

With time, innovation has gotten plenty of advancement in how we interact and communicate with others. From the first ever mobile in the 1970s, things have changed very swiftly to mobile invented to this date. Researchers and Engineers are working on adopting new technologies to make mobiles smaller, faster, and more efficient and this could only be possible with the help of PCBA which allows them to put more components in comparatively smaller space. This innovation in mobiles can only be due to PCB assembly inspection capabilities.

Nowadays, more and more manufacturers are aware of the importance of printed circuit board testing, and thus a large number of specialized testing service providers have emerged. Now you can easily find iPhone 7 circuit board test, smartphone motherboard PCB test service, mobile phone charger PCBA test service and so on online.

What are the cell phone circuit board tests?

The following are the tests that need to be carried out during the production process of mobile phone PCBA:

ICT Test: This test includes measurement of Voltages, Current and their fluctuations, I-V curves, checking of circuit continuity, noise, and amplitude.
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FCT Test: Comprises simulation testing, burning program in IC, detection of software and hardware problems, and simulating entire PCBA functions and operations.
Aging Test: In this testing phase PCBA is kept continuously in operational mode to observe any failure. Basically in this test PCBA is meant to be energized for a longer time to fulfill mentioned purpose.
Fatigue Test: Is mainly purposed for measuring the probability of PCBA failure, for this purpose PCBA is kept under high frequency for a longer time in operational mode.
Environmental Tests: This phase is meant to estimate the reliability and robust nature of PCBA. In this test, PCBA exposes to very harsh environmental conditions like high temperature, low temperature, high operational and low operational tests, rain test, dust test, and shock and vibrational tests.
PCB manual inspection: Manual inspection is to directly observe the surface defects of the mobile phone circuit board with the naked eye or a magnifying glass. The accuracy of this inspection method is limited by the service provider’s ability.
AOI inspection: That is, the mobile phone PCB or PCBA is tested by automatic optical equipment. It is widely used and is used in the detection of inner circuit, outer circuit, SMT assembly and other processes.
Cellphone board test short circuit: After the PCBA boards are produced, these boards are subject to quality control before shipment to ensure the reputation of the processing plant. Usually we will take some samples from a large number of finished products and conduct a short-circuit test on them with a multimeter.

How to conduct mobile phone PCBA testing

Personally, the mobile phone PCBA test video above can easily help you complete the entire testing process. For organizations, FS Technology can provide a variety of testing services for your mobile phone PCB assembly, and conducts testing according to customer needs during the course of the project. In order to ensure the quality of mobile phone PCBA assembly and mobile phone finished assembly, we will conduct more rigorous testing on these orders. Following are checking points in PCBA testing of mobile phones:

Functionality of PCBA: It determines how well mobile PCBA performs to check proper functionality of the circuit.
Component Limitations and Procurement: PCBA testing in mobile is also important because it also ensures its component’s availability before the time of need. If this point is left unchecked then it may cause a delay in the final mobile PCBA delivery time.
Conductivity: At this point, copper plating and PCB lamination is being tested to ensure better conductivity and to test its tensile strength.
Electric Current: This point check and measure if there is minimum leakage current in mobile PCBA, for better current conductivity and to make it power more efficient device. Usually we can use a digital multimeter to check the mobile phone circuit board.
Power Section Test: It is important to test voltage vs current at different points within PCBA, and if there is more than nominal power or not enough minimal power, then this problem is addressed properly by following some defined set of rules by professionals.
Ports Test: Normally ports are used by the mobile to interact with its surroundings. In this test point, there is proper checking of the port interface if they are short or open, and ensure each port is in its perfect state.

It’s very crucial to check all the above-mentioned testing points in order to ensure Mobile PCBA is a top-notch product with no single quality-related problems.

Basic Tools to Perform PCBA tests on Mobile

After knowing what is PCBA testing on mobiles, it’s important to know which tools are required to perform this operation on PCBA.

Oscilloscope or Signal Analyzer: This is a helpful tool to visualize the voltage change behavior at different points in PCBA.
Signal Generator: It is also called Function Generator, it generates desired AC signal and is mostly used to energize PCBA or part of PCBA to test a certain portion of PCBA.
Multimeter: common electric device to check different electrical parameters of PCBA like voltages, current, connectivity, frequency, resistance, etc.
LCR Meter: It measures those electrical parameters that normal multimeter can’t measure like inductance and capacitance.

Conclusion:

The Crux of all the above discussion is that PCBA testing in mobile is very crucial to check whether PCBA and components on them are working properly or not. PCBA testing is done by both mobile manufacturers and mobile repairers in order to make the device lifespan longer. PCBA test in mobile tests device from different aspects and ensure more reliability and durability.

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