ASTER Technologies
ASTER Technologies is a leading provider of high-level software solutions for optimizing Printed Circuit Board Assembly, Manufacturing and Test, from design through production. Founded in 1993, the company has developed a unique expertise in Electrical Testability and Test Coverage Analysis, to help electronic manufacturers deliver defect-free products.
ASTER Technologies Portfolio consists of a fully integrated suite of Computer-aided Engineering (CAE), Computer-aided Manufacturing (CAM) and Product Lifecyle Management (PLM) software solutions. These enable electronic manufacturers to optimize the design to test flow. The TestWay™ family of Design-for-test (DfT) and Test Coverage analysis tools improves product reliability and quality, by striving to detect and prevent all defects from design through production. It combines with QUAD®, an integrated software suite including traceability, fault diagnosis and quality management tools, to deliver enhanced manufacturing services for Industry 4.0. The EMS 4.0 software platform enables tremendous benefits in time-to-market, cost reduction, reliability and quality improvements.
QuadView® is a powerful set of scalable board and system viewing modules that can be used either as a standalone viewer, or fully integrated within customer applications. QuadView has a unique digitization capability that allows users to create the schematic view directly from a searchable PDF file. It provides full interactive cross-probing between layout, schematic and netlist viewers, and other products within the ASTER portfolio such as TestWay™ solutions and QUAD®. Within the manufacturing environment, QuadView becomes an integral part of the repair cycle, assisting in locating faults and reducing repair time significantly.
TestWay™ is the industry leading software solution providing a unique approach to analyze electrical testability requirements and test coverage at board and system level (twSystem). The electrical DfT analyzer enables designers to validate designs, at the schematic capture stage, to ensure that adequate measures have been included to comply with the manufacturers test requirements. it enables users to define the manufacturing line, including a combination of inspection and test equipment, allowing test coverage estimation to be carried out for each individual test stage and the consolidated coverage for the complete production line. By simulating various combinations, customers can leverage the benefits of each machine to reduce the number of diagnostic inaccuracies, while eliminating redundancies. This analysis can be used to generate lean machine programs to reduce the overall test time for the product. TestWay Express also allows measurement of the real test coverage for each test and inspection machine of the test line. As a result, it is possible to make a comparison between the estimated and real test coverage to ensure the optimal test strategy is implemented on the shop floor.
QUAD® (QUality ADvisor) is a software suite built around a centralized database for optimizing and streamlining the collaboration between different disciplines to improve productivity, quality and reliability. It has been designed to provide traceability of any board /systems electronic production data. It offers a powerful support for PCBA fault diagnosis and collects board repair data, for paperless repair. QUAD provides access to detailed information in real-time that can be presented clearly and precisely using advanced reporting. By providing an open data viewing software environment, it allows real time monitoring of manufacturing issues and problems to improve yield. It also supports links to Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, finite capacity scheduling, SPQ/SPC modules, and can handle complex bills of materials (BOMs) and engineering change orders (ECOs).
