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February 2014 • The PCB Magazine 69 Dan: where do you see Gardien in five years? Todd: Really Dan, in five years or 10 years I see Gardien as the absolute answer to quality assurance for the PCB industry. I know all the OEMs are throwing equipment to test the prod- uct, but Gardien goes way beyond that. Can we supply equipment solutions, yes. However, with this industry you have to go way beyond that: supply the test, and back it up with ex- perts that know what the OEM world wants, challenge OEM requirements that don't meet specification and ultimately close the loop from the OEM to the manufacturer. Dan: Todd, when did we actually start elec- trically testing boards and why? Did people just take their chances before we tested boards? Todd: I cannot speak to the genesis of elec- trical test, as I joined the industry in 1986, even though I'm really not that old! I know there was manual testing done before that. In that era we were dealing with standard PTH technology and using digitizing tables to plot drill programs to do self-learning of the materials we drilled. Back then it was all self-learn and comparison test- ing. We would roadmap a piece of film and us- ing a digitizing table to map out the drill pro- gram necessary. Then we would drill the plate and just place pins in a 1" fixture and let the test machine learn the electronics. This was a long time ago. I pioneered some of the netlist testing back in the 80s with some colleges from Tektronix. Dan: what method was first used? was it point-to-point or did we use bed of nails test or what? Todd: As I stated, it was all self-learning back in the day. As a test house, we never had the Gerber data or any means to create the strong programs used today. As testing evolved it became necessary for test houses to gain strength in this arena and bring stronger quality assurance solutions to the market. The problem back in that era was that the technol - ogy did not exist. Dan: I know that early on, test heads were very expensive, and then Mania came up with the system where you could drill your own head templates and use four-inch pins to make up test heads. If I remember right, the pins were reuseable. Todd: That's right. The early days of test fix- tures were either 1" or a catalogue of other to- pographies. Mania brought their Cube that did use the longer spring-loaded probes. In this era the solutions were just being developed for test- ing of the PCBs. There were a lot of manufac- turers of test equipment that were getting into the arena. However, netlist testing still had not been born. These technologies in this time were still using self-learn logics. Dan: Please take me through the next stag- es of equipment development. Todd: For me it came down to the fact we need to evolve. In the late '80s, the company I worked with was working with Tektronix, and a brilliant software engineer by the name of Alan Kent took it upon himself to work with us and design programs that would load in to the now-ancient Trace 948 Grid Test Machine. We worked a lot of hours troubleshooting the process but in the end we had a working netlist program that would have the intelligence of the board loaded in the machine prior to the board being tested. Although I know the industry was also perfecting and developing this technology CONvERSATIONS wITH...GARDIEN'S TODD KOLMODIN continues