Ship Without Testing? Why We Stand Behind 100% FCT on Every PCBA
A board can assemble perfectly and still fail in the field. Wrong firmware loaded at the factory. A dead channel on an interface. A marginal voltage that only shows up under load. Solder joints are fine, the board looks beautiful — and the product doesn't work.
That's the gap that functional testing exists to close. AOI and X-ray verify that the board was built correctly. They can't verify that it behaves correctly. Only a functional test — power it up, exercise the circuits, measure what comes out — can tell you whether a PCBA assembly actually does its job.
Our own test line, not a rented afterthought
That's why we built our own FCT (functional circuit test) line in-house, 100% of our own design and build. Every board gets tested against its spec — function, voltage rails, signals, interfaces — through automated fixtures that adapt to different board types and product requirements. It's fast enough to run in production flow and detailed enough to catch real faults, not just the easy ones.
Why in-house instead of renting capacity? Because a rented test line is a black box — you don't control the fixtures, the test coverage, or the data. Our own line means the test programs are written by engineers who understand the board's design intent, the fixtures are maintained by people who see the failures first-hand, and every test result is logged with the serial number it belongs to. When we say a board is tested, we can show you the data.
Testing is part of the product
When we say a board ships tested, we mean literally: it went through the FCT line, passed the program for its product type, and its results are on record. If anything ever comes back from the field, we can pull up exactly what that board did on the bench — the voltages it produced, the signals it carried — and compare it against the day it left.
For customers whose boards end up in equipment that can't afford failure — industrial, medical, automotive, robotics — that's the difference between a partner and a gamble. Ask your manufacturer one question before you commit: what percentage of boards actually go through functional testing, and can I see the data? If the answer doesn't include "100%" and a demo, it's worth a second thought.
What FCT catches that AOI can't
It helps to make the difference concrete. AOI looks at a board and checks geometry: is this resistor present, is that joint shaped right? It's a great guard, and we run it on every line. But geometry says nothing about behavior. FCT powers the board up and asks the questions that matter: does the firmware boot to the right version? Do all channels on that interface carry data? Does the voltage rail hold within spec when the load switches on? Is the signal integrity what the design intended, across the edge cases?
We've caught things in FCT that no optical inspection would ever see — a wrong firmware image from a supplier's programming house, a marginal clock that only failed at temperature, an interface channel dead on one board in fifty. Those are the failures that become field failures, and field failures become angry customers. When a buyer asks "is this board tested," the honest answer has two parts: yes, it was inspected — and yes, it was powered up, exercised, and measured. That second part is FCT. It's the difference between knowing a board looks right and knowing it works.
