Air Force awards $1.3 million contract to Ridgetop Group
Ridgetop Group, a supplier of advanced diagnostic and prognostic tools for complex electronic systems, announced today that it has received a $1.3 million contract to deploy its Expert Troubleshooting and Repair System (ETRS) at the Air Force’s Air Logistics Center in Warner Robins, GA (WR-ALC).
The Air Force has awarded Ridgetop prior contracts to refine its innovative technologies to improve test and fault coverage at depot-level repair facilities. The average age of the Air Force’s fleet of aircraft has exceeded 23 years, and increasing numbers of circuit boards and modules contained in avionics or radar systems are drifting away from nominal performance. Many of these boards and modules pass all conventional depot-level tests but are subsequently revealed to be defective by failing in-system. These costly no-fault-found (NFF) occurrences sometimes cycle many times through repair bays, further compounding the unwarranted expense.
To root out troublesome soft faults and intermittencies, Ridgetop has designed the ETRS to directly address the issue. Under the two-year contract, Ridgetop engineers will work closely with personnel at WR-ALC to integrate the ETRS software into the standard Air Force Versatile Depot Automatic Test System (VDATS) stations. Ridgetop will focus on reducing the incidence of NFFs for digital, analog, and mixed-signal circuit-card assemblies (CCAs). Ridgetop has also engaged a site contractor, ALAE, to assist in qualification and testing of the solution.
According to Andrew Levy, VP of business development, “We are pleased to have been selected by the Air Force to meet their depot-level test requirements. Our modular ETRS solution can also be integrated with other automated test stations where extended fault coverage is needed.”
