The bone pile is where boards that failed test or inspection collect until someone has time to troubleshoot them. A growing bone pile signals a process problem or a debug bottleneck, so production managers track its size and age. Boards leave it repaired and retested, harvested for parts, or scrapped.
Heard on the job
Bone pile is up to 80 boards from last week's build, most are the same BGA fail, start with those.
Also heard as
- bonepile
- fail pile
Related terms
Rework
Removing and replacing parts or fixing joints on an assembled board to correct defects or make changes.
Golden board
Known-good assembled board kept as the reference for testing, comparing and debugging others.
Bed of nails
Test fixture with an array of spring-loaded pins that touch every test point on a board at once.