Producing Quality Phones
Cellular Phone Radio Tester

Project
Cellular phone manufacture is a highly competitive and fast-paced industry, with new phones being introduced every few months. As a result, factory efficiency, manufacturing costs and time-to-market are key factors for success.

Our customer is a cellular phone test platform provider, who sought to tailor a high performance and highly expandable system with their own peculiar demands for PC hardware and a number of custom devices. Advantech, with deep experience in this area, and excellent research and manufacturing resources, was able to meet their needs by providing IPC units of great expandability, flexibility, and customized parts such as removable HDD bay and removable PSU.

Requirements
‧Specified PC dimensions for forming bundled chassis
‧Customized power supply unit to provide rear-swapability convenience
‧Customized I/O openings to provide extra RS-232 ports on rear
‧Dual, front-accessible 2.5 inch HDD trays
‧Customized backplane for 1 PICMG 1.3 SHB and 4 PCI slots
‧Gigabit Ethernet support

System
Advantech provided a PCE-5124 CPU card in an IPC-6025 chassis,featuring slim dimensions of 111 x 212 x 450 mm (W x H x D) which exactly matched the customer’s machine racks. They can stack 2-in-1 or 4-in-1 systems, either vertically or horizontally, as easily as stacking blocks, allowing for great flexibility in system design. The PCE-5124 is Advantech’s staple PICMG 1.3 systemhost board (SHB), supporting a Core™2 Quad CPU at a maximum speed of 2.82 GHz. It features high expandability, supporting one PCIe x16 and four PCIe x1 backplane.

This project needed to build cellular phone audio test equipment. Our IPC units are built into a test platform; they connect to the automatic test equipment with GPIB (General Purpose Interface Bus) and collect and transmit test data to and from the control room of the cellular phone factory via Gigabit Ethernet. Our solution involves several custom designs, such as a HDD bay removable from the front, and a PSU module removable from the rear, all of which facilitate fast, easy maintenance. There is no need for a maintenance service engineer to open the chassis for repair; they simply swap HDDs directly from the front side and swap power units directly from the rear, saving time and cost.

To cope with the dynamic needs of this changing industry, the system provided great flexibility and expandability. Instead of a standard 3.5” HDD tray, our custom design supports two 2.5” HDD trays, together with rich I/O’s consisting of PCI/PCIe and USB slots, allowing for a greater range of applications.

Conclusion
In the highly price-competitive cellular phone industry, reducing manufacturing costs, including test costs per phone, is crucial for success. Equipment cost, test time and floor space are among the key factors in deciding test costs. However, less visible costs, such as maintenance, support and training are often overlooked, but they actually compose a large portion of the total costs. Advantech provides standard or custom products that deliver great flexibility and expandability, with a great variety of dimensions so that our customers can choose components that exactly meetthe specific demands of their system designs and space allotments. More importantly, we provide all-in-one solutions to reduce maintenance costs for our customers.

Recommended Products

IPC-6025  5-slot Desktop/Wallmount Chassis with Scalability for Multi-system Solution

PCE-5124  LGA775 Intel® Core™ 2 Quad SHB with PCI Express/VGA/Dual GbE/6 COM Ports