SPEA is an Italian company that designs and manufactures Automatic Test Equipment (ATE) for testing MEMS, Sensors, microchips and Printed circuit board.
The Company, founded in 1976 by Luciano Bonaria, today employs about 800 people, distributed among the Italian headquarters in Volpiano (Turin) and the subsidiaries located in USA, Mexico, Germany, China, Korea and Singapore.
The main application fields for SPEA's equipment are the following:
Automotive
Aerospace & Defence
Consumer
Energy, Solar & Power Electronics
EMS
Lighting
Medical
MEMS & Sensors
Mobile & Communication
Touch Display
In all these fields, SPEA's equipment is used to perform electrical and functional production tests on the electronic devices before they are shipped to the customer, so to ensure the products are defect-free and will work correctly through time.
Testers for electronic boards are divided into:
"Bed of nails" testers are used for testing PCBAs in mass production, where the low cost of test and the near-zero field return rate are the key industry needs. This type of tester can execute several test techniques - such as In-circuit test, Boundary Scan, AOI, Functional Test, LED light test, built-in self-test so to provide a complete test of the PCBAs before the end-of-line test.
Flying probe testers are often used for testing Low to Mid volume production, NPI, prototypes and boards that present accessibility problems (so, components cannot be contacted by using a bed-of-nails test system). Linear motors and linear optical encoders on each moving axis make them suitable to probe points on PLCCs, SOICs, PGAs, SSOPs, QFPs, and others, without fixturing or complex programming required. The high speed of the latest flying probe models makes them suitable also for high volume production.