Test-bench Design for New Beam Instrumentation Electronics at CERN

The Beam Instrumentation group has designed a new general-purpose VME acquisition board that will serve as the basis for the design of new instruments and will be used in the renovation of existing systems in the future. Around 1200 boards have been produced. They underwent validation, environmental stress screening and run-in tests to ensure their performance and long term reliability. This allowed to identify potential issues at an early stage and mitigate them, minimizing future interventions and downtime. A dedicated test-bench was designed to drive the tests and continuously monitor the board functionality. One board has more than 45 functions including memories, high speed serial links and a variety of diagnostics. The test-bench was fully integrated with the CERN asset management system to allow lifecycle management from the initial production phase. The data captured during these tests was stored and analyzed regularly to find sources of failures. This was the first time that such a complete test-bench has been used. This paper presents all the details of the test-bench design and implementation.