Functional & Reliability Testing

Functional Testing
Functional testing ensures that ATP products match the product specifications agreed upon by ATP and the industrial/OEM customer, and also ensures the compatibility of each product in diverse host environments. ATP functional tests include:

1. Performance Tests: Performance tests check the real performance of a product against product specifications. ATP utilizes several industry recognized benchmarking software such as HDBench, ATTO Disk Benchmark and CrystalDiskMark to measure the input/output performance, read and write speed verifications and latency measurements.
2. Electrical Tests: Electrical tests measure the electrical specifications of a product such as power consumption, firmware verification, and idle current measurements. Furthermore, functionality testing of DRAM products also includes tests, like pattern tests, density tests and ECC function tests.
3. Mechanical Tests: Mechanical tests verify the conformity of the mechanical designs with major industry standards such as SDA, CFA, and JEDEC. For increased credibility, the tests are conducted by an internationally-recognized third party agency.
4. Compatibility Tests: Compatibility tests ensure that ATP products are compatible with various operating systems (Windows 7,or Linux), interface commands (DDR3, SATA,or USB), and different card readers/digital cameras/motherboards. A testing matrix of products, operating systems, and interfaces is formed to seek out any possible issue that may occur during the user’s experience.
5. Certificate and Compliance Tests: Given that different countries and regions require products to comply with various industrial or environmental standards such as CE, FCC, RoHS, Reach, UL94, IP67,US MIL and WHQL, ATP products undergo these tests with a third party agency.

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Reliability Testing

Reliability tests measure product functionality during an interval of time in a real-life environment. The failure rate of electronic products over time is commonly termed as the “Bath Tub Curve”. There are three time zones in the following graph: a) Zone I illustrates a high, but rapidly decreasing failure rate in the early stage, which is normally caused by manufacturing defects. ATP employs long-hour and high temperature “burn-in tests” to weed out defective products and thus significantly lower the failure at this stage. b) Zone II, the middle stage, is the service life stage. Failure at this stage is usually caused by random failures. This is where ATP’s robust product designs and high quality can minimize the failure rate and extend the product service life. c) Zone III is the “worn-out period”. Long operating hours and harsh application environments gradually deteriorate the integrity of the products.

Given that performance can drop over a long period of time, the three major fields in reliability testing include:

1. Environmental Tests: Environmental tests ensure that the products can function normally in extreme temperatures. The products are tested in different operating temperatures at extremely high and low temperatures. Also, to ensure that the products can be stored in harsh environments, high temperature/high humidity storage tests are simultaneously conducted. In order to simulate different environmental challenges, tests such as the salt water spray test and UV light exposure test are also administered.
2. Mechanical Tests: Mechanical tests validate the mechanical integrity of ATP products with the additional factor of time. Drop tests and random vibration tests are also performed.
3. Electrical Tests: Electrical tests include extensive on/off cycling tests that replicate the end user’s on/off behavior when using ATP products. Contact and non-contact ESD tests are also given to establish the ESD resistance of the products.      

The ATP research and development team is committed to providing the highest quality products, each test is rigorously designed to ensure the ATP brand.