Performance Software has completed the development, integration, and testing of a new Environmental Stress Screening (ESS) Automated Test Panel and successfully delivered it. This rugged, highly configurable hardware-and-software solution was built for a leading aerospace supplier to identify early manufacturing defects in aviation electronics by automating thermal, vibration, and other critical environmental screening tasks.
Built to meet the stringent reliability demands of airborne systems, the ESS solution streamlines end-of-line manufacturing validation by applying temperature, vibration, and other stress profiles that mirror real-world aircraft operating conditions. The system monitors device inputs and outputs, executes automated stress sequences, and flags potential failure modes before products enter service.
Key Advancements
In just seven months, Performance executed a comprehensive modernization of the ESS platform—refreshing both the hardware and software architecture to deliver a safer, leaner, and more production-ready solution. Key advancements include:
- Lean, simplified design: Achieved a 40% reduction in components by removing non-essential circuitry, enabling a smaller footprint, cleaner layout, and easier long-term maintainability.
- Safer, smarter power integration: Designed power rails directly into each unit, eliminating exposed rack-mounted power supplies. This improves safety by lowering fire and shorting risk while simplifying power distribution.
- Major footprint and wiring reduction: Redesigned the digital input/output (DIO) relay control card to a smaller form factor, dramatically cutting internal wiring and enabling the host computer to be reduced to 1U, since full-size Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) slots were no longer required.
- Optimized cost performance architecture: Introduced a hybrid custom-design plus commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) architecture, blending a Performance-designed core printed circuit board (PCB) set with carefully selected COTS components to deliver a high-capability solution with improved affordability and supply chain resilience.
The result is a modern ESS platform that is rugged, robust, scalable, and purpose-built to accelerate high-confidence production screening of aerospace electronics.
Breakthroughs That Expanded Capability
During development, the engineering team added new functionality requested to give operators more control over the test system and clearer insight into the real-time behavior of the device under test. These updates expanded what the panel could do without disrupting the core screening process, making it easier to run tests, observe performance, and understand how each unit responds under stress.
At the same time, the team significantly simplified the platform by removing an entire host of circuitry that was not being utilized effectively. Identifying what could be eliminated, and what should be retained or reused, proved to be one of the more challenging parts of the redesign.
Demonstrating Performance’s Evolving Hardware Expertise
The ESS Automated Test Panel reflects Performance’s continued growth as a hardware solutions innovator for aerospace and high-reliability systems. The program demonstrates Performance’s ability to:
- Re-engineer mature platforms from the ground up
- Eliminate obsolescence concerns in decades-old systems
- Reuse and adapt proven concepts efficiently across different form factors
- Deliver safety, manufacturability, and cost improvements simultaneously
Together, these capabilities enable customers to keep critical test infrastructure current, scalable, and ready for next-generation production demands.
From non-critical aircraft electronics to the most demanding avionics and control-system test environments, Performance continues to expand its capability to design and deliver advanced test solutions that improve product readiness and operational confidence.
Performance’s expanded hardware lab played a key role in enabling this program and strengthens our ability to deliver more advanced avionics hardware solutions. With more space, tools, and dedicated bench capacity, our teams can tackle increasingly complex avionics hardware efforts end-to-end.
To learn more about Performance’s custom aerospace hardware solution capabilities, contact our team.
