Testing of PCIe boards in manufacturing

Hi All -

My company is about to start a production run of a board with a PCI-Express interface. For our initial manufacturing run, we're having the manufacturer insert each board in a computer we provide. The computer will boot into a lightweight OS image that will then trigger some tests on the board and will stress test the PCIe interface by sending data back and forth to the board over PCIe.

While this process works, it's extremely slow due mostly to the boot times of the computer. For reasons I won't get into here, we actually have to boot the computer twice to test each card. The slow test time directly translates into increased manufacturing costs. For future production runs, which will be larger volume, we want to find a more efficient way to test the boards.

So I am wondering if others here have any insights they can share as to how testing of PCIe boards is handled by companies that mass produce PCIe boards.

Thanks

I thought nowadays PCIe systems are hot-plug ready? I know NI's hardware uses PCIe and all their modules are hot pluggable, though obviously this requires some work on the software end.

mtwieg said:

I thought nowadays PCIe systems are hot-plug ready? I know NI's hardware uses PCIe and all their modules are hot pluggable, though obviously this requires some work on the software end.

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Yes - we would have to port our driver and tests to Linux I think to take advantage of hot swap, but it is an option we are considering.