references to primary sources . please improve this by adding secondary or tertiary sources . june 2010 learn how and when to remove this template message type private company founded 1978 headquarters maple grove minnesota united states number of locations 7 key people greg michalko ceo products test fixture automatic test equipment number of employees 225 worldwide website www.circuitcheck.com circuit check is an american company with about 225 employees and seven direct operations in six countries the u.s. canada mexico united kingdom china and malaysia . headquartered in maple grove minnesota it is one of the largest manufacturers of electronic and mechanical test fixtures in north america 1 . the company also manufactures automatic test equipment for end of line manufacturing test . the company uses either a microsoft excel driven ccitest software platform or the national instruments labview software platform . contents 1 history 2 milestones 3 notes 4 references history edit circuit check was founded in 1978 as a spin out of a printed circuit board drilling service bureau circuitdrill . the initial product was test fixtures for bed of nails testers . over the following years the company developed innovations for in circuit test and functional test or fct . one the pneumatically actuated clamshell test fixture electrically probes a circuit board from both sides . the company also combined in circuit test with functional test in the same test fixture in 2004 by developing and patenting the two stage fixture having pins of two different lengths and compressing to two different heights . 2 milestones edit the company devised a method for applying strain gage testing to determining the stresses placed on circuit boards by the hundreds or thousands of test probes used to make electrical contact therewith . 3 4 this is useful because each test probe a.k.a. pogo pin exerts several ounces of force on the dut device under test . when the test fixture has thousands of test probes the sum of the individual probe forces can reach hundreds of pounds . such force is sufficient to deform the dut a printed circuit board for example to the point where the attached inflexible electronic component packages such as ball grid arrays may fracture or their solder joints may fail . strain gage testing can reveal areas on the dut where these net forces are excessive when the dut is clamped into the test fixture thus showing where supports must be added to the opposite side of the test fixture to counteract the test probe forces . where a support counteracts the test probe forces the test probe force is converted from a deformative force distorting the dut to a compressive force squeezing the dut circuit board without deforming its generally planar shape . notes edit circuit check completes expansion and renovations pcb007 jan 8 2010 . u.s. patent 7 200 509 strain gage testing predicting and preventing brittle fracture of bgas smt magazine june 2004 julia goldstein 87 . d. strain gage testing standardization smt magazine july 2005 mudasir ahmad rich duggan tom hu brett ong carter ralph sundar sethuraman and dongkai shangguan references edit an in circuit test channel partner interview series the selection and economics of wireless test fixtures goliath business profiles pcb007 magazine bloomberg businessweek u.s. patent application 20100019793 for test fixture alignment retrieved from https en.wikipedia.org w index.php title circuit check & oldid 729872420 categories electronic test equipment manufacturershidden categories articles lacking reliable references from june 2010all articles lacking reliable references navigation menu personal tools not logged intalkcontributionscreate accountlog in namespaces article talk variants views read edit view history more search navigation main pagecontentsfeatured contentcurrent eventsrandom articledonate to wikipediawikipedia store interaction helpabout wikipediacommunity portalrecent changescontact page tools what links hererelated changesupload filespecial pagespermanent linkpage informationwikidata itemcite this page print export create a bookdownload as pdfprintable version languages add links this page was last modified on 15 july 2016 at 04 26 . text is available under the creative commons attribution sharealike license ; additional terms may apply . by using this site you agree to the terms of use and privacy policy . wikipedia is a registered trademark of the wikimedia foundation inc. a non profit organization . privacy policy about wikipedia disclaimers contact wikipedia developers cookie statement mobile view