Publication date: 10 June 2010
Everett Charles Technologies, a subsidiary of Dover Corporation (NYSE: DOV), is a leading manufacturer of electrical test products and services, including semiconductor test products, bare-board automatic test systems, Pogo® test contacts, and bare and loaded PCB test fixtures. ECT manufacturing, service, and support facilities are located throughout Asia, the United States, and Europe.
The Fixture and Services Group (FSG) drives the standard for board level manufacturing test. The group provides support for Supply Chain and Product/Project Managers with sales, programming, engineering, manufacturing and service centers in the Americas, Europe and Asia.
A. The company has evolved greatly during this time to reflect the evolution taking place in the market. This includes the reduction of resources in the U.S., and increased resources globally as we follow our customers’ trends to low-cost global manufacturing. Our focus has been and will continue to be intimacy with the customer, and developing products through technology and service that reflects our customers’ needs.
A. We partner with our customers to provide the electrical test solutions that will meet their specific product needs, and then deploy and service those needs in the global region that our customers require. This starts early on in customer product development with DFT support, through NPI, ramp up production, and finally warranty/repair.
A. As center and pad spacings have gotten smaller, conventional fixture technology costs have increased. This increase prohibits low-volume and NPI tests to use standard ICT test methods, and has forced customers to rely heavily on flying prober machines. Flying probe test is a good enough test, but not optimal for the customer. The test time is just too long, taking between 20 minutes to over an hour per board, depending on the complexity of the board and the test to be run. With the Pure Zoom™ fixture, we offer the customer an opportunity to perform full ICT tests with speeds of conventional ICT test at a fraction of the cost compared to conventional ICT methods.
A. This is not an easy question, as it has required several technology enhancements/innovations to make this all come together. This includes several proprietary and complex software steps, adaptor expertise and a long history in the bare board test market where we have leveraged some technologies for the loaded board test space.
A. I am very proud of our global team of more than 400 employees who work together to support our global customers. Every employee is focused on partnering with our customers to help make their product a success. In our case, this is through the test portion of manufacturing. Our fully owned manufacturing sites around the world work closely together to satisfy our global customers.
A. I do see expansion opportunities as we continue to strive to follow our customers’ manufacturing model. We do not have any announcements today, but as our customers move, so will ECT.
A. Our organization is focused on change because that is what makes us successful in the market. We stay close to our customers, and constantly evaluate how we can change to better service customers to ensure that we are a part of their success. In the coming years, we will be the catalyst of change related to products and technology to reduce costs, increase accessibility and improve time to market. This will be an exciting year.
