TCXO test system for mass production

In the manufacture of TCXO's nothing is more important than having a precise and productive means to measure the frequency vs temperature characteristics of the oscillators. This paper describes an automated system that has been developed to make such measurements. The test system that is described in this paper was developed for large scale production of leaded and SMD TCXO's having frequencies up to 50 MHz. The test system has capacity to test up to 2,048 oscillators in a single test cycle. The oscillators are plugged into sockets if leaded or held onto contact points if SMD in arrays of 256 units per test panel. The test system accommodates up to 8 test panels simultaneously. This paper presents a description of the physical system, the control software and the system's overall performance. A comparison of test data taken in this automated system with the test data of devices tested one at a time in a separate test chamber are presented to illustrated the precision and repeatability of the system. Utilization of the system for such diverse tasks as temperature testing quartz resonators and the real time monitoring of the process of stabilization of miniature OCXO's is also discussed.