Board in from manufacturing

So we received our big beautiful board back from manufacturing and it's cool. This is the first project I've worked heavily on, with regards to design, researching components, sourcing components and verifying correct connections. It's a very dense board, there's barely any room for any other additions and everything is packed tight.

Anyways, when a new board like this comes in, the last thing we do, is power it up. There's a whole load of tests that need to be done first. First test is to check what parts are missing throughout the board. Then we must check to make sure that the components that should not be populated on the board are not there. At the same time, where these devices shouldn't be, there should still be a pad if we need to add a component at a later stage of testing.

Next step is to check the orientation of all the tantalum capacitors, ensuring that the positive is connected to the correct power line. Orientation checks must also be done for all integrated circuits, diodes, LED's, inductors, crystals and any transistors or 3 legged circuits by carefully observing pin 1 against the board file (created before manufacturing by our SI team).

Next we need to ensure that there are no shorts between the power lines ranging from 0.9, 1.2, 1.5, 1.8, 2.5, 3.3, 5 and 12 volt lines. Ideal resistance should be greater than 400ohms, unless there is a sense resistor involved (these need to be worked out exactly), but there should never be a complete 0ohm resistance between any two planes.

Checking these same planes, we verify them against each other to make sure there is no shorts between each voltage plane. Rules go the same as I mentioned above for checking ground shorts.

After all these checks have been and the necessary components have been fixed, it is now possible to power on the board and perform voltage checks throughout the board to verify correct function of all the DC-DC converters.

The rest of the tests after this become much more complicated and specific to each project depending on what IC's there are on the board and the device's functionality and specifications.

All in all, this board is going to be very interesting for me, I know most of the parts already and what they should be doing, so I'm not completely in the dark this time.