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Special iSSueExciting Articles on Test & Measurement
Test and Measurement:
Whats Coming Up Next?
Whats New in Mixed Signal
Oscilloscopes?
Optimise Your Test System
Smartly
T&M Trends for RF Designers
Is Your Oscilloscope
Smart and Connected?
For You
$ 5
Test & Measurement
Special
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Table of Contents1. Test & Measurement Exciting Times Ahead
........................................................................5
2. Selecting The Right Modular Platform for Test and Measurement
......................... ......10
3. Test & Measurement Whats Coming Up Next
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...........13
4. Smart Test & Measurement Supporting Innovation in Other
Industries ........................18
5. Top 6 Trends in Test & Measurement
..................................................................................23
6. Testing in manufacture
...........................................................................................................26
7. Optimise Your Test System Smartly
.....................................................................................31
8. In-Target test automation and test quality Tools
................................................................34
9. T&M Trends For RF Designers
......................................................................................
.......37
10. Is Your Oscilloscope Smart And Connected?
.........................................................
.......42
11. Whats New In Mixed-Signal Oscilloscopes
............................................................
.......46
12. Multimeters For High-End Testing
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..........49
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EFYREPORT
5T E S T & M E A S U R E M E N T S P E C I A L
New human interface devices like touch, gesture and speech
recognition will take centre stage this decade, making it possible
to analyse data like never before
TesT & MeasureMeNT exciTiNg TiMes ahead
uMa BaNsal ments have come to be recognised as star
performers.
In 2009-10, the T&M industry in India grew by 10.8 per cent.
The total market size today stands at Rs 8 bil-lionup from Rs 7.22
billion of the previous fiscal year. Ever-changing technology,
application needs, ad-vanced industrial environment and growing
demands are inspiring T&M manufacturers to keep in sync. As a
re-sult, the T&M industry has witnessed
many changes in terms of technology upgradation, price
competency and new products over the last few years.
sectors driving the growthAerospace and defence, telecom,
man-ufacturing, government and education sectors are the biggest
growth drivers for T&M in India. These sectors need T&M and
monitoring tools to help engineers accelerate the performance of
computing and networking through high-speed serial technologies;
apply digital RF technologies to create flex-ible wireless networks
and mobile devices; incorporate embedded sys-tems; and facilitate
high-quality video through multiple digital formats and
channels.
Apart from these traditional sec-tors, solar and LEDs are the
prominent growth drivers today.
The telecom sector needs instru-ments for high-frequency
measure-ments. The defence sector needs high-reliability
instruments and the educational sector needs low-cost instruments,
says Chandmal Goliya, managing director, Kusam Electrical
Industries.
The growth of T&M in the tel-ecom sector has been fuelled by
the fast growing subscriber base and arrival of new technologies
like 3G, WiMAX and LTE. There is a large requirement for on-site
installation and service of equipment in telecom, says Manish
Kwatra, CEO, Metro Electronic Products.
For telecom applications which combine voice, video and data,
devices
Test and measurement (T&M) instruments have remained the
backbone of all manufactur-ing and service industries for several
decades. But though they play pivotal role in most industrial
segments, all the attention was earlier enjoyed by core industry
devices. The scenario has, however, changed now. From being a less
glorified performer, T&M instru-
Keithley 4225 PMU
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EFYREPORT
6 T E S T & M E A S U R E M E N T S P E C I A L
such as protocol analysers, network analysers, volt/amp/watt
meters, logic analysers and signal generators are in large demand,
adds Rajesh Suresh Joshi, manager-business development, Dynalog
(India).
There is tremendous potential for T&M in the defence
industry too. Indias total spending on the defence industry is
expected to reach $36 bil-lion by 2013. For supplies to defence, it
is mandatory that a certain percentage of these be sourced locally
even in the procurement deals signed with foreign suppliers,
informs Neelam K. Kumar, executive director, Aplab Limited.
The aerospace and defence sector would mostly be interested in
high-end vector network analysers, spec-trum analysers and signal
generators up to 50 GHz, adds N.V. Valsalan, head-test &
measurement and broad-cast, Rohde & Schwarz India.
The increasing automation in vari-ous industries, including
automotive, food and beverages, and textiles, will need
sophisticated test instruments at various check points of every
stage to minimise repairs afterwards in the production lines.
devices availableGautam Awasthi, general manager (marketing),
electronic measurement group, Agilent Technologies India,
classifies T&M devices into two broad categories based on their
usage: Ad-
vanced/application-specific and basic.
Advanced or appli-cation-specific. Equip-ment such as network
analysers, protocol testers, spectrum ana-lysers, and cable and
antenna testers cater to specific T&M require-ments and
therefore fall under application-specific category.
Cable and antenna testers measure cable losses,
distance-to-fault functions, etc and are normally used in field
installation and maintenance. Similarly, spectrum analysers are
used in spectrum monitoring, checking the hopping and interfering
signals in a particular band, and characterising any particular
communication standard.
Basic. Equipment such as multim-eters, power supplies, function
genera-tors, oscilloscopes and frequency coun-ters come under basic
category and can be seen on every electronics test bench. These
instruments are normally used in general-purpose debugging of the
device-under-test.
recent trends driving innovationsWireless. The combination of
advanced technical capabilities brought about by digital RF and the
increasing customer demand for more functionality and seamless
mobility has led to a number of innovations in wireless
communi-cations. The latest advancements in T&M are mostly
pertinent to WiFi test systems, SIM card tests and network
testers.
Latest technologies like LTE use MIMO antennae with 22
configura-tion enabling data rates of 100 Mbps in downlink and up
to 50 Mbps in uplink. This means that todays test equip-ment should
be able to simulate such scenarios and also handle multiple radio
access technologies to facilitate testing, says Valsalan.
Embedded systems. Embedded
technology is being used to deliver new applications and
services in a va-riety of industries including consumer
electronics, industrial electronics, auto-motive, avionics, medical
and commu-nications. A major trend on the design side is energy
efficiency. Integration of more switch-mode power supplies in
embedded systems is bringing about test issues. The use of a
switch-mode power supply obviously introduces switching into the
end product.
Another key trend is dynamic pow-er management. Embedded system
de-signers using off-the-shelf processors will spend more time
looking at power usage. Hence they need to learn how to better
program the devices with programmable frequency and voltage
scaling.
In general, embedded systems are rapidly becoming more complex
and this applies not only to high-end handsets but also to low-cost
childrens toys. This, in turn, will lead to system-level test
issues, which is eventually leading T&M vendors to package more
tests into their instruments.
Serial data communication. The shift from parallel to high-speed
serial data communications is one of the sig-nificant trends in
recent times. So USB compliance testing is an important area for
test and measurement. There are already some six billion USB
devices worldwide. And with USB 3.0 poised to enter the design
mainstream, its a technology with huge growth potential.
Major applications 1. Communications (cellular test,
wireless and wireline tests, optical)2. Aerospace and defence
(surveillance,
signal intelligence)3. Research & development (digital,
RF,
microwave, etc)4. Security (surveillance, military
communications)5. Core electronics (data acquisition,
control, automation, semiconductor, component test,
nanotechnology, RF and microwave)
Gautam Awasthi General Manager (Marketing)
Electronic Measurement Group Agilent Technologies India
DSA-X 92504A digital signal analyser by Agilent Technologies
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EFYREPORT
7T E S T & M E A S U R E M E N T S P E C I A L
One important implication for test equipment going forward is
that the expertise to validate channel compli-ance needs to be
embedded into the instruments. Besides, advanced serial protocols
are likely to make probing more challenging.
Video. In the video industry, T&M will continually evolve as
new technol-ogies arrive and picture/audio specifi-cations and
delivery systems change. It will be a whole new ballgame with
digital video and its multiple formats, compression methods, screen
sizes and other variations. The transition to higher-resolution
digital video requires a new class of test and measurement tools
for broadcasters to accommodate newer, faster and more complex
tech-nologies such as HD, 3G-SDI and IP.
Semiconductor chips. Keeping up with the design trends is pretty
chal-lenging for T&M companies. This eventually means designing
ever-more capable front-end ICs for next-genera-tion
instruments.
The steadily shrinking prices of microprocessors make it
financially feasible to incorporate multiple mi-croprocessors into
the design of inex-pensive instruments. In this way, each different
instrument function (display, analogue-to-digital conversion, etc)
has its own dedicated microprocessor, allowing far higher
throughput as no function has to wait its turn for pro-cessing by a
central processor.
At the same time, as the worldwide demand of semiconductors for
cell-
phones, portable wireless devices and consumer electronics
grows, T&M designers have to offer instruments capable of
testing the increasingly sophisticated components that go into
these devices.
T&M design trendsIncreasingly complex test-ing requirements
are driv-ing T&M manufacturers to improve and incorpo-
rate features like multichannel testing, higher bandwidth and
smoother PC interface with user-friendly software. Transition from
analogue to digital, and from standalone instrument to a total test
solution, and development of application-specific test instruments
are the primary transitions.
Driven by the user need, there is transition towards hybrid test
equipment that occupy less space but perform multiple functions.
Test equipment are now no more mere benchtop. These are
increasingly be-coming integrated with PCs for real-time
measurements and monitoring by adopting PXI (peripheral extension
interconnect), PCI (peripheral compo-nent interconnect) PC-based
platform and VXI technologies.
Software-defined instrumenta-tion based on National
Instruments
LabVIEW graphical programming platform, parallel processing
technolo-gies, and new methods for wireless and semiconductor tests
help engineers develop faster and more flexible auto-mated test
systems.
Also, T&M instruments today in-corporate highly graphical
displays/readouts and are easier to interface with external
ancillary equipment such as part handlers, probers and switches.
Use of new communication interfaces and smart switching is changing
the way they are used.
New communication interfaces. Until recently, instruments
employed GPIB and serial (RS-232) interfaces for PC communications.
Today, however, most system instruments include Eth-ernet, or
better yet LXI and USB inter-faces, in addition to the legacy
buses, which may be provided as optional or standard equipment.
Over time, higher-performing and lower-cost interfaces will win
out over legacy interfaces such as GPIB on rack-and-stack
instruments. But this displacement is likely to take years to
transpire, anticipates Klaus Leutbecher, vice president-worldwide
sales, Keithley Instruments.
Smart switching. Manufacturers of switching hardware for
automated testing have been talking up this con-cept for production
test applications for close to two decades. Now some new designs
employ an embedded
test script processor (TSP) that offers enhanced capabilities
for controlling test sequencing/flow, decision-making and
in-strument autonomy.
Users program and com-municate with TSP-enabled in-struments in
two wayseither by executing individual TSP commands (similar to
sending individual SCPI commands) or by writing test scripts.
De-signed to reside on the instru-ment or switch mainframe itself,
such scripts are a collec-tion (list) of instrument control
commands and/or program
Digital storage oscilloscope by Kusam Electrical Industries
MSO 5204 mixed-signal oscilloscope by Tektronix
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EFYREPORT
8 T E S T & M E A S U R E M E N T S P E C I A L
statements that can be executed on command. The use of these
scripts can eliminate the transmission time from the PC to the
switch system because all commands and statements in the script are
executed by the mainframe. For switch mainframes equipped with an
LXI interface, all TSP configuration and script loading and data
transfer can be performed via this interface, explains
Leutbecher.
Whats comingIf the last decade is anything to go by, the next
one holds tremendous promise for the test and measurement
industry.
We will see ultra-high-speed net-works making it possible to
access all the content from the Web online. This could make test
and measurement platform-independent and available through the
providers portal as a service harnessing the power of mul-tiple
connected systems to perform complex measurements and analysis.
Perhaps, a more modular app like sys-tem would be the order of the
day with minimal footprint on the client device
and demand-based selection of features online, says Yasir Fahim,
general man-ager, ADInstruments.
New human in-terface devices like touch, gesture and speech
recognition will take centre stage, making it possible to analyse
data like nev-er before. Touch-screen panels and ultra-portability
are expected to trans-late into significant leaps forward for the
test and measurement industry, says Mohammed Ghouse, country
manager (business communication), Scientech Technologies.
Wireless sensing will get further refined and more accurate.
Tech-nologies such as wireless charging for telemetrical probes
will establish in the mainstream right down to the consumer
electronics level.
According to Mrs Kumar, De-mand for synthetic instrumentation
(with high performance, less footprint, ruggedness, high levels of
integration, faster testing, flexibility and reconfigu-rability) is
probably the next big wave in T&M.
Ultra-fast I-V sourcing and meas-urement capabilities are
becoming increasingly critical for many technolo-gies, including
compound semiconduc-tors, medium-power devices, non-vola-tile
memories, micro-electromechanical devices (MEMS), nano devices,
solar cells and CMOS devices as well as high-power discrete or
so-called high-brightness LEDs. Using pulsed I-V signals to
characterise devices rather than DC signals makes it possible to
study or reduce the effects of self-heating (joule heating) or to
minimise current drifting in measurements due to trapped
charge.
Transient I-V measurements allow scientists and engineers to
capture ultra-high-speed current or voltage waveforms in the time
domain or study dynamic test circuits. Pulsed
sourcing can be used to stress test a device using an AC signal
during reliability cycling or in a multi-level waveform mode to
program/erase memory devices.
Emerging 3G and 4G communica-tions standards are driving
invest-ment in the performance products and mainstream embedded
applications are increasing in demand.
Spectrum analysers are also seeing an increase in demand as
needs for greater wideband performance in radar and spectrum
management increase, particularly in intelligence, regulatory
monitoring and defence applications.
Manufacturers face challenges, though The challenges before
T&M manu-facturers can be summarised in three wordssmaller,
faster and cheaper. In other words, their products must be able to
characterise ever-smaller compo-nents more quickly and less
expensive-ly. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the development
of instrumentation for nanotechnology research.
Nanotechnology has the potential to improve our quality of life
in diverse ways, such as faster electronics, huge memory/storage
capacities for PCs, cheaper energy through more efficient energy
conversion, and improved security through the development of
nanoscale bio- and chemical-detection systems. However, before
these new technologies become commercial realities, researchers
must be able to characterise nano material and device
Key challenges for manufacturers 1. Lack of electronic devices,
discrete
or embedded, indigenously available 2. Hybrid equipment
thwarting the sales
of discrete testers3. Constantly evolving standards and
technology, particularly in wireless 4. Growing rental market
restraining the
sale volumes5. Heavy influx of imports, especially
low-value products6. Misperception about the use of T&M
instruments7. Lack of qualified, trained hardware
and RF engineers8. Price-sensitive customers and hence
price constraints9. High initial investments10. Trading more
prof i table than
manufacture under present policies11. In-house demand volumes
are very
small12. Lack of motivation and favourable
policies from the governmentNeelam K. Kumar, Executive
Director,
Aplab Limited, India
Caddo iSeries by Scientech Technologies
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EFYREPORT
9T E S T & M E A S U R E M E N T S P E C I A L
properties quickly and accurately. Electrical characterisation
is es-
sential to gain insight into phenomena that occur beneath the
surface of nano materials. For example, gate dielectrics in
advanced semiconductors can have a physical thickness of less than
one nanometre; the performance of these dielectrics can be
predicted only by evaluating their equivalent electrical thickness.
Similar considerations apply to carbon nanotubes, silicon wires and
graphenethe basis for many nano innovations.
One of the main challenges in elec-trical characterisation of
nano materials and structures is dealing with ultra-low signal
levels. Another challenge is the wide range of behaviour that these
materials and components can exhibit. For example, polymer
materi-als can have resistances greater than one gigaohm. However,
when drawn into fibres less than 100 nm in diameter and doped with
various nanoparticles, a polymer may be changed from a su-perb
insulator into a highly conductive wire. The result is an extremely
wide range of test signals.
Detecting tiny electrical signals at the low end of the range
requires high-sensitivity, high-resolution instruments such as
electrometers, picoammeters and nanovoltmeters. Also, using these
instruments for high-level signals as well demands instruments with
a very wide dynamic range.
T&M manufacturers are also faced with the challenge of a
shorter turna-round time. With the turnaround time (concept to
design to volume produc-tion) increasingly becoming shorter due to
the market competition, new and efficient methods of verifying the
integrity and quality of handsets and similar products are required
by all handset makers. With elements of design regularly being
developed in different places, it is important to have common
industry-standard test tools that enable groups to share
informa-tion and resolve problems quickly. The quickening rate of
technology changes means a faster cycle time for new prod-
Major contributors to this report
Chandmal GoliyaManaging director, Kusam Electrical
Industries
Gautam AwasthiGeneral manager (marketing), electronic
measurement group, Agilent Technologies India
Neelam K. KumarExecutive director, Aplab Limited
Naresh NarasimhanCountry marketing manager Tektronix India
Sumit SharmaMarketing manager-India, Good Will Instrument
Mohammed GhouseCountry manager (business communication),
Scientech Technologies
Yasir FahimGeneral manager, ADInstruments
Rajesh Suresh JoshiManager-business development, Dynalog
(India)
N.V. ValsalanHead-test & measurement and broadcast, Rohde
& Schwarz India
Klaus LeutbecherVice president-worldwide sales, Keithley
Instruments
Manish KwatraCEO, Metro Electronic Products
ucts entering the verification stage.High-volume manufacturing
re-
quires innovations from T&M vendors so as to lower the test
costs. Handset manufacturers demand solutions that can help them
reach the market faster with a lower cost of testing and
con-sequently a lower cost of production.
india: still a costly affairThere are already a few Indian
T&M companies having their manufacturing base in India, while
it is not the case for MNCs. In India, the import duty on raw
materials is still high and therefore importing the finished goods
is cheap-er than locally producing them. As the Indian T&M
market is still taking the shape and India is yet to be known as
one of the best places for EMS, setting up manufacturing facility
in India may be a costly affair for any global T&M maker, says
Sumit Sharma, marketing manager-India, Good Will Instrument.
Need of the hourThere are a few steps that can be taken to help
India become the R&D hub for T&M equipment.
Naresh Narasimhan, country marketing manager, Tektronix India,
says, Companies are looking at world-class manufacturing and lean
manufacturing techniques to reduce the production costs so that the
ben-efits can be passed on to the end-user. Having said this, the
infrastructure should be improved tremendously. Besides, the
government should change its policies and automation should be
considered. Components and sub-systems required for manu-facturing,
like chassis/power supply modules, should be made available at zero
duty. Excise duty and sales tax for electronic test equipment
(present-ly 8.24 and 12.5 per cent, respectively) should be brought
down. Finally, more manufacturing units from sup-port industries
like plastic moulding units for quality cabinet design and
manufacturing are needed.
The author is executive editor at EFY
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TesT & measurement
10 T E S T & M E A S U R E M E N T S P E C I A L
The architecture of a test and measurement system depends upon
the needs and future requirements of its intended applica-tions.
While investing in cutting-edge technology is a must to keep pace
with todays innovation, it is not always economically viable to
move to an en-tirely new platform. Here we compare the various test
platforms, helping design engineers to make an informed
selection.
LXILAN eXtensions for Instrumentation (LXI) is an
Ethernet-enabled instru-mentation standard, introduced in 2005,
with the aim to ride on the suc-cess of the Internet. With the
Internet gaining widespread popularity, the Ethernet bus interface
was chosen due to its versatility and easy accessibility.
The LXI consortium is an industry consortium of 53 test and
measure-ment companies that maintains the LXI specification,
promotes the LXI stand-ard and ensures interoperability. It
continues to keep pace with advance-ments in its ecosystem. For
instance, it recently announced the adoption of the IPv6 extended
function, which ensures that LXI vendors approach IPv6 in a
consistent way before its use in test systems becomes
widespread.
LXI-based systems are built on a backbone of small modular
instruments that utilise the low-cost, open-standard local-area
network (LAN) or Ethernet. Of course, there are other modular
in-struments available that work on com-
Modular test platforms allow engineers to put together a system
that meets just about any need by mixing and matching different
technologies. There are many platforms available to choose from.
Take a look at their merits and demerits
Selecting The Right Modular Platform for Test and
Measurement
Dilin AnAnD
peting platforms, but the advantage of LXI systems is that these
do away with the cost and complexity of card-cage architectures.
Furthermore, the integra-tion of instruments is a breeze.
Binoy Johnson, a hardware design engineer, says, The
difficulties faced with Ethernet-based systems also make their way
here. LXI-based systems would require you to rope in your IT
department for instances such as discovering the instruments and
then setting them up.
While there have been many claims that LAN (or other buses) are
ideal for all applications, the reality is that each bus has
different strengths
and real-world systems take advantage of multiple busses in a
unified software framework. In particular, LAN is well suited for
distributed applications, but not necessarily for desktop
measure-ments or automated testnotes the National Instruments
whitepaper Understanding LAN/LXI for Instru-ment Control.
Another feature built into this plat-form is interoperability.
LXI devices can communicate with PXI and VXI instruments by
utilising the inter-changeable virtual instrument (IVI) driver that
the standard mandates for just this purpose.
Sadaf Arif Siddiqui, marketing pro-
AXIe-based device
LXI trigger bus connector VXI embedded controller and remote
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TesT & measurement
11T E S T & M E A S U R E M E N T S P E C I A L
gramme manager, Agilent Technolo-gies, says, While the platforms
are many, we maintain common measure-ment science and algorithms
across all portfolios so that users can easily mix-and-match the
best of products and dont face any compatibility issue.
VXIVME eXtensions for Instrumentation (VXI) is the oldest
platform discussed here. Launched way back in 1988, it is an open
standard platform for automated test. This platform was established
by Hewlett Packard (now Agilent Technologies) and Tektronix.
Although an old technology, VXI does have its plus points. A
good thing about VXI instruments is that they can be power cycled
indepen-dently of the PC. This allows you to keep away from the
frustrating task of rebooting the PC, says Johnson.
VXI is based on the older Ver-saModule Eurocard (VME) bus
de-veloped for the Motorola 68000 line of CPUs, which is not a part
of the latest computer architectures and leaves VXI unable to take
complete advantage of the advances in PC technology and software.
The engineers need to be trained to understand the VXI
pro-gramming.
To modernise an existing VXI system, it is more cost-effective
to invest in a PXI chassis and controller to control the VXI system
using Mxi-2 technology rather than purchase a new VXI
controllernotes the NI white-paper Working with VXI Platforms.
However, as a PXI- or VXI-based system can be heavily dependent
on the performance of the host PC, in order to get higher
performance, you
Test Platforms ComparisonLXI PXI VXI AXIe
Controller Any Intel PC-based Motorola or Intel PC-based Intel
PC-based
Controller interface Mainly message-based Mainly register-based
Register or message-based Register or message-based
Bus interface Ethernet PCI, PCIe Motorola 68000 (parallel) PCI
Express or LAN
Typical bus throughput (bits/s) 1G 1G 256M 10G
Power and cooling Independent for each instrument Common based
on chassis Common based on chassis Common based on chassis
Year 2005 1997 1987 2009
might have to spend a bigger amount in the initial stage
itself.
Mike Gooding concludes his paper VXI Plug n Pray with some
informa-tive remarks: The test industry has come a long way in
providing inte-grators with instrument hardware that plug together
electrically and physically. Their companion efforts in software
have not been as simple, nor well-defined. These software efforts
have produced significantly easier integration of instruments into
test systems. However, we are still far from declaring successful
achievement of plug-and-play ease to integration. It is still very
much a plug-and-pray activity.
AXIeAdvancedTCA Extensions for Instru-mentation and Test (AXIe)
is a new modular test instrument standard. It is an open standard
that creates a robust ecosystem of components,
products and systems targeted at general-purpose instrumentation
and semiconductor test.
The AXIe platform allows design-ers to achieve some critical
high-per-formance instruments like high-speed logic analysers,
digitisers, serial bus protocol analysers and high-band-width
arbitrary waveform generators, which were having some limitation on
other modular platforms.
Siddiqui explains, AXIe has been proposed to the industry by
three founding members: Test Evolution Corp, Aeroflex and Agilent.
Since its introduction in November, there have been four additional
companies that have joined the consortium.
Like VXI was built on the VME standard and PXI on the PCI
standard, the AXIe standard is built on an exist-ing standard,
AdvancedTCA. This standard is primarily used as a compu-tation
chassis standard by networking companies such as Cisco. It provides
the capability modules that require higher power or density than
can be supported by PXI, he adds.
The ATCA specifications lever-aged by this platform were
developed to meet the high data rates and pro-cessing performance
of the telecom industry. ATCA backplanes provide protocol-agnostic,
multilane, switched-serial links among boards, and the backplanes
support transfer speeds as high as 10 Gbps per lane (see the table
for comparison).
PXIDeveloped in 1997, PCI eXtensions for Instrumentation (PXI)
was introduced in 1998 as an open industry standard to meet the
increasing demands of com-
PXI module
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TesT & measurement
12 T E S T & M E A S U R E M E N T S P E C I A L
plex instrumentation systems. Today, PXI is governed by the PXI
Systems Al-liance (PXISA)a group of more than 70 companies
chartered to promote the PXI standard, ensure interoperability and
maintain the PXI specifications.
The PXI modular platform has been around for more than a decade
and cur-rently enjoys the largest product base. PXI describes a
mechanically modular platform that uses the PCISIG-governed
peripheral component interconnect (PCI) or PCI Express to control
the modules. PXI-based instruments also depend heavily on a PC, and
are gener-ally Windows-centric as the specifica-tion defines only
WIN32 drivers. Most PXI instruments are register-based products
that require software drivers hosted on a PC for control.
One of the main difficulties with PXI-based instruments comes
from their tight integration to the PCfrequent rebooting of the PC
is forced on the user
during PXI development. This com-plicates the software
installation and instrument start-up, shares Johnson.
PXI focuses on a central processing model using products that
are modular and rely on a high-speed data bus for communicating
with the CPU that does the computing to perform system func-tions.
Utilising CompactPCI, this plat-form gains on performance and
industry adoption. Data bandwidth performance of PXI systems easily
exceeds the per-formance of the older VXI test standard. Perhaps
this is one of the reasons for the huge adoption of PXI by test
managers.
Over the last few years, the industry reached a tipping point in
automated test and is now making a large-scale switch to PXI. In a
recent survey of test manag-ers from around the world conducted by
NI, over 70 per cent of test managers indicated they will use PXI
as the core of at least one of their next automated test systems.
This is in contrast to only 30 per
cent of test managers who will continue to use rack-and-stack
instrumentation, says Denver Dsouza, senior technical consultant,
National Instruments.
Perhaps the best thing about PXI is that, because it is based on
off-the-shelf PC technology, the performance gains come faster and
at a much lower cost with each advancement in that arena.
Is there any competition between PXI and the newly released AXIe
plat-form? Adesh Jain, applications consult-ant with Agilent
Technologies, doesnt think so. AXIe is seen more like an extension
of the PXI test-development model rather than as a competitor to
PXI. It leverages existing standards from Advanced Telecom
Computing Architecture (ATCA), PXI, LXI and IVI. The standard is
broadly applicable to general-purpose instrumentation and
semiconductor test, he explains.
The author is a tech correspondent at EFY
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ON OPEN SOURCE
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EFY report
13T E S T & M E A S U R E M E N T S P E C I A L
While todays technology offers solutions for monitoring or
remote reporting via mobile devices, test organisations need new
expertise to unite the networking, Web services and mobile app
portions of the solution
uma Gupta
test & measurement Whats Coming up Next
ments. Instruments are being designed to measure such signal
levels. The measurement data also needs to be analysed. To enable
this, PC connectiv-ity has become a common feature on
general-purpose test instruments.
T&M needs across different seg-ments are broadly common. But
deep-down, there are different levels of test-ing and
different-grade T&M products being used.
Requirements across segmentsWithin education, where test and
measurement is mainly meant for
teaching or research purpose, there is quite a significant
difference between two sub-segments. In undergraduate labs, basic
or mid-range instruments such as digital multimeters, power
supplies, oscilloscopes and function generators are mainly used to
do some basic measurements and learn differ-ent aspects of testing.
But in research work, high-end scopes, spectrum ana-lysers, network
analysers and vector signal generators are used in such ar-eas as
high-energy physics, nanotech-nology, millimeter-wave and UWB.
In aerospace and defence, high-bandwidth, high-frequency
T&M
T esting plays a critical role from the very beginning of the
product life-cycle, i.e., the de-sign stage. Be it any technology
or any product, unless and until it is validated and tested, it
cannot be manufactured and produced for the market.
Test engineers need to measure the parameters of the signals
with a high degree of accuracy and performance. Today, circuits are
packed in compact assemblies and affected by a lot of interference,
noise and unwanted sig-nals. This, in turn, affects the
measure-
PXI platforms by National Instruments
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EFY report
14 T E S T & M E A S U R E M E N T S P E C I A L
instruments are being used for state-of-the-art electronic
systems such as RADAR, satellite and surveillance. Shortening the
product development cycle has long been a key objective of military
and aerospace organisations. One method to reduce the develop-ment
time is concurrent design and test, which is often represented with
the V-diagram product development model. In these industries, for
which the end product is a highly complex system of systems, the
left side of the V-diagram is considered design and the right side
represents test.
Defence communication systems have traditionally been analogue
in na-ture. However, digital technologies are replacing the
traditional analogue com-munication systems. To successfully
im-plement the digital systems, one needs to analyse the technology
manifestations in different environments. Software-defined and
modular test systems can be used to meet these requirements.
Catering to each technology, there may be various testing needs.
For instance, in communication one may have to check the signal
frequency, power, harmonics, etc, while in auto-motive one may have
to do different levels of stress testing, torque testing, pressure
testing, etc.
As wireless communication con-tinues to grow, the pressure to
find innovative ways to more effectively use channel bandwidth is
increasing. One of the most recent innovations is the development
of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antennae systems to
improve the signal-to-noise ratio and increase the throughput.
Ac-curate testing of MIMO transceivers presents significant
challenges to exist-ing test instrumentation architectures. New
architectures like hybrid PXI or benchtop instrumentation enable
not only advanced signal processing algo-rithms to multiplex and
de-multiplex various spatial streams but also tight synchronisation
between transmit and receive antennae.
In general, T&M users are increas-ingly demanding the best
possible measurement and source accuracy,
noise, signal response, and system throughput for todays
demanding measurements. With the constant evolution of technology,
they expect upgradeable instruments with back-ward technology
support. Also, as data rates increase, there is demand for
higher-bandwidth instruments. In the manufacturing domain, fully
auto-mated environment test setups are in demand. Similarly, as the
communica-tion technologies move from 2G to 3G to 4G, one needs
handheld, portable but rugged instruments to deploy base stations
and towers.
Users want the T&M instruments to be capable of offering
universal con-nectivity via GPIB, USB, LXI/Ethernet and other
interfaces. They increasingly expect T&M products to keep pace
with rapid evolutions in desktop, mo-bile and Internet computing
standards, the most recent of which is support for mobile devices
like smartphones and tablets. The software that enables all of
these advanced capabilities must be simple and easy to understand,
use and integrate into human interactive and programmatic
applications in the lab and the factory.
Different instruments at a glance Oscilloscopes by and large
have seen most changes over the last couple of years.
With the availability of high-end
technology like digital signal proces-sors and
field-programmable gate ar-rays at low cost, signal acquisition has
become pretty fast. This has made it possible to get real-time
display on the LCD of a digital oscilloscope, unlike in cathode-ray
tube oscilloscopes. With digital oscilloscopes, it is also
possi-ble to add advanced features like fast Fourier transform,
waveform recorder, data logger, advance triggering and logic
channels at a very low cost, says P. Prabhu, general manager
(technical), Scientific Mes-Technik.
Other test instruments like digital multimeters, function
generators and frequency counters have also shrinked in size with
advanced features. Mi-crocontroller-based designs in these
instruments have helped in reducing the number of mechanical
switches, thereby improving the products per-formance and life.
With automation for mass and quality product manufacturing,
there is increase in the use of measuring instruments in production
lines. Some-times the measurement data needs to be collected and
analysed in less than 10 seconds. Multiple data needs to be
collected while the product is on the conveyor belt for a very
short duration. These challenges are being met with new
instruments.
Specifically, general-purpose T&M instruments have witnessed
the fol-lowing changes in terms of technology:
N9344C handheld spectrum analyser by Agilent Technologies
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EFY report
15T E S T & M E A S U R E M E N T S P E C I A L
Oscilloscopes. The current gen-eration of oscilloscope is
digital storage oscilloscope, digital phosphor oscillo-scope,
mixed-signal oscilloscope and mixed-domain oscilloscope. Analogue
oscilloscopes too have become digital read-out type and offer
various con-nectivity options.
Each type has its own distinct fea-tures. Digital storage
oscilloscopes pro-vide a high real-time sampling rate and memory
depth. Besides, these perform a number of automatic measurements
and display results on an LCD screen. With digital technique, they
can be remotely operated and become a part of the automatic test
setup.
Spectrum analysers. Spectrum analysers are available in
frequencies ranging from 1 GHz to several GHz and are capable of a
number of power calculations in different units with comparisons.
EMI pre-compliance capability, limit lines, improvement in dynamic
range and connectivity are some of the technical improvements.
Multimeters. Multimeters today are digital with LCD read-out.
Human safety is of prime importance in both handheld and benchtop
types. Resolu-tions up to 6.5, 7.5 and 8.5 digits are
available.
New digital multimeter designs are increasingly expected to
provide higher levels of precision and stability, as well as more
standard built-in func-tions like capacitance, frequency and
temperature measurement. End users are also looking for digital
multimeters
that can ensure near-universal connec-tivity and come with
simple software drivers, utilities and application-sup-port
software.
Digital multimeters are frequently being integrated with switch
main-frames to provide more complete test and measurement solutions
in a single enclosure.
Keithleys Series 3700A system switch/multimeter family is one
example. It offers scalable, instru-ment-grade switching and
multi-channel measurement solutions that are optimised for
automated testing of electronic products and components. Series
3700A mainframes are equipped with many standard features. For
ex-ample, easy connectivity is supported with three remote
interfaces: LXI/Ethernet, general-purpose interface bus (GPIB), and
universal serial bus (USB). Fourteen digital I/O lines are also
included, which are programmable, informs Chuck Cimino, marketing
director, Keithley Instruments.
Arbitrary waveform generators. VLSI technology based arbitrary
wave-form generators offer a number of arbi-trary waveforms in the
built-in library.
Signal generators. Advancements in signal generator design
include more programmable signal control, faster and deeper
waveform memories, improved usability and connectivity, and greater
throughput and signal performance. Other improvements include the
simulation of high-speed serial interface clocks and data
layers,
as well as LTE modulation evolution.Power meters. With the
growth of
the smart grid, line power meters are increasingly required to
provide serial communication capabilities, in addi-tion to standard
features like flexible connectivity, usability and
application-support software. RF power meters must support higher
frequencies and more selectivity due to increasingly complex
communication modulation standards and tighter regulations on
in-band and out-of-band transmitter power qualifications and
testing.
Focus areasThe main technological advancements which are
applicable to any T&M product are modularity or
upgrade-ability, PC controllability and intercon-nectivity,
application software, rug-gedness, high bandwidths, accuracy,
repeatability and multiple functionali-ties in the same
instrument.
Also, the emphasis is on intelligent battery charging and power
efficiency.
Above all comes the safety of op-erator and installation. Thats
why the complete range of IDEALs industrial clamps is designed with
TightSight dis-play. It allows an electrician to keep his head and
face out of potentially danger-ous panels while viewing the
measure-ment. The high-voltage indicator is another feature that
indicates presence of voltage even with the dial set to the wrong
function. The clamps carry CAT III and IV ratings, and come in a
rugged construction. UL listing adds to safety measures, says
Sushil Tare, sales man-ager, electrical, Ideal Industries
India.
There is a trend to use common development platforms on which a
range of instruments can be built. This approach has several
advantages for test system manufacturers and, in turn, their
customers. It makes it more eco-nomical to deliver common
interfaces and improved usability benefits. It also helps reduce
development cycle times and provides greater economies of scale,
which enable more product functionality and features to be offered
at lower prices.
Through shared components,
Caddo iseries
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EFY report
16 T E S T & M E A S U R E M E N T S P E C I A L
high-speed buses, and open, user-defined software, modular
instrumentation is best suited to meet the needs of test and
measurement today and in the future. NI modular instruments are the
building blocks of economical and versatile automated test systems.
With modular instruments, you can choose from a wide variety of
measurement, signal generation, RF, power and switch modules and
then configure the instruments in software to meet your specific
measurement tasks. Because these instruments are modular and
software-defined, they are quickly interchanged and easily
repurposed to meet evolving test needs. Additionally, NI modular
instruments provide high-speed test execution by harnessing the
power of industry-standard PC and advanced timing and
synchro-nisation technologies. Options are available for a variety
of platforms including PXI, PXI Express, PCI, PCI Express and USB,
informs Nandini Subramanya, senior marketing com-munications
manager, National Instruments India.
With the availability of improved semiconductor devices in
smaller sizes, T&M instruments have not only become
cost-effective but also smaller in size and better in
perfor-mance.
Digital storage oscilloscope is a good example. The MDO 4000
mixed-domain oscilloscope from Tektronix com-bines digital storage
oscilloscope and spectrum analyser functions in a single unit.
Scientechs i-series products, viz, Caddo 831i oscilloscope, 4064i
function generator and 4074i programmable power supply, offer
digital read-out and Eth-ernet connectivity, explains J.K. Baldua,
director-technical, Scientech Technologies.
Agilent Technologies works closely with various stand-ards and
organisations and helps users with innovative and reliable test
products.
Sadaf Arif Siddiqui, technical marketing specialist, Agi-lent
Technologies India, informs, Be it a basic test instru-ment or a
high-performance instrument, we go hand-in-hand with technological
advancements across all segments. A typi-cal example is the
upgradeability feature, which is present in our entire range of
oscilloscopes, spectrum analysers and network analysers. We have
also incorporated some unique features in our products, such as
OLEDs in digital multim-eters, no fans and no vents in handheld
spectrum analysers, and function generator in benchtop
oscilloscopes.
Overcoming the challenges Production volumes for T&M
instruments are gener-ally much lower than for consumer devices
like PCs, smart-phones and tablet computers. This means that
leading-edge features common to these consumer devices, such as
capaci-tive touchscreen interfaces and super-high-resolution colour
screens, arent as affordable for T&M applications.
T&M instruments need to be designed with industrial-grade
components that remain available for many years for design
stability reasons. One reason why industrial products are typically
a few generations behind consumer devices as far as interfaces and
related elements are concerned is the
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17T E S T & M E A S U R E M E N T S P E C I A L
and FPGA devices that are constantly increasing in speed.
Multi-core proces-sors are now available in industrial and
mil-grade versions to allow more sophisticated user interfaces and
digital signal processing to be used in medium- and lower-cost
instruments.
Doing more in software rather than hardware helps reduce costs
and im-prove functionality and flexibility for users and can also
facilitate platform reuse and leverage.
Key trends driving next-generation devices The global race to
achieve useful, in-tuitive, elegantly integrated products is well
underway in the T&M sphere, just as it is in the mobile phone
and computing worlds.
Many of the advances in the next generation of instruments will
be related to usability and connectivity to support the
Internet-friendly gen-eration of users. Though signal per-formance
in T&M will always remain a top priority, human-to-machine and
machine-to-machine interfaces will get some much needed
attention.
To understand the implications of these interfaces for T&M
products and vendors, one needs to just look at the smartphone
revolution to see how product innovation and brand leadership in
such devices can shift the dynamics of a very large consumer
industry in just a few years.
To meet the reduced profit margins due to increased competition,
T&M manufacturers will need to innovate and use new
technologies of smart mobile devices and cloud computing.
While tablets and smartphones can-not replace ubiquitous PC or
PC-based measurement platforms like PXI, they offer unique benefits
when used as extensions to a test system. When The Nielsen Company
surveyed consumers in 2011 to understand why they were using
tablets instead of traditional PCs, the top reasons cited included
user experience improvements like superior portability, ease of
use, faster startup time and longer battery longevity. Given this
information, the expected use cases for mobile devices within
automated test include test system monitoring and control and test
data and report viewing.
While todays technology offers solutions for monitoring or
remote reporting via mobile devices, test or-ganisations will need
new expertise to unite the networking, Web services and mobile app
portions of the solution.
Development of next-generation single-chip T&M instruments
using the latest extreme ultraviolet technol-ogy will help increase
the operating margins without any compromise on the functionality.
With the rapid rise in communication technologies like 3G and 4G,
the implementation of remote testing will reduce the costs
significantly, says Paras Dagli, execu-tive director, Dynalog
(India).
In short, the Internet and the seem-ingly never-ending demand
for more mobile computing devices and capa-bility means that future
generations of T&M equipment will also continually be
challenged to deliver faster, better and easier to obtain
results!
The author is an executive editor at EFY
time it takes for displays and other such components to become
avail-able for industrial products. Also, the product cycles of
typical T&M product designs are much longer than for con-sumer
devices.
Despite challenges related to scale and T&M product
longevity and design cycles, a growing number of industrial
components suppliers are working to close these gaps. The use of
shared product platforms can help raise volumes to interesting
levels for individual vendors and through value-added suppliers of
such assemblies.
On the signal conditioning front, ongoing advances in
semiconductor devices and analogue and RF ICs are helping to push
sensitivity, signal range and speeds when used in instrumenta-tion
front-ends. Refreshing product designs frequently and, in some
cases, using modular design approaches can help enable fresh access
to the latest analogue components, as well as dis-plays and user
interface technologies.
Processing power for embed-ded designs also continues to evolve
exponentially with specialised DSP
P. Prabhugeneral manager (technical),
Scientific Mes-Technik
Sadaf Arif Siddiquitechnical marketing specialist, Agilent
Technologies India
Sushil Taresales manager, electrical,
Ideal Industries India
Major contributors to this report
Chuck Ciminomarketing director,
Keithley Instruments
J.K. Balduadirector-technical,
Scientech Technologies
Nandini Subramanyasenior marketing
communications manager, National Instruments India
Paras Dagliexecutive director,
Dynalog (India)
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Technology Focus
18 T E S T & M E A S U R E M E N T S P E C I A L
Janani Gopalakrishnan Vikram
As various industries face pressure to innovate and deliver
higher quality and performance, they, in turn, expect the test and
measurement world to deliver super-capable systems that are more
accurate, intelligent and fast. let us see how T&M is evolving
to meet these stringent demands
smart Test & measurement supporting innovation in other
industries
consumer. In defence, for example, technology is being used to
provide real-time intelligence to the aerospace/defence personnel,
to keep them con-nected and reduce riskwhich re-quires highly
reliable systems. Hence high-performance test equipment must be
available to test these state-of-the-art weapons and space systems.
Plus, the T&M instruments should be well supported and
affordable.
Any form of R&D is also very stringent in its technical
requirements.
Customers like the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and
Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL) are very specific in their
technical require-ments as there is no margin of error permissible
in their work. Since quality and performance are critical factors
in communications, T&M plays a huge role there too. Likewise,
high-speed circuit design manufacturers also require high-end logic
analysers and oscilloscopes. In short, almost every technological
field that is high on in-novation requires a lot of support from
the T&M industry.
Indeed, the T&M industry is also innovatingto help others
innovate. Rapid technological developments and innovations have
transformed the T&M landscape over the last decade. For
example, digital signal processing and software interface with
comput-ers have enabled analysis of results. Miniaturisation
technology has made the instruments portable and easy to
handleportable instruments are technically on par with
sophisticated lab instruments. PCI Express external interface and
the use of mobile tech-nology have also made significant strides,
says Mahendra Pratap Singh, business development manager,
Fluke.
Gautam Awasthi, general manager-marketing, Electronics
Measurement Group, Agilent Technologies India, points out that the
T&M industry is quick to imbibe new technologi-cal advancements
such as faster and smaller semiconductor chips, better and brighter
displays, and convergence or consolidation.
As the requirements of client industries such as wireless,
defence and space research get more and more stringent, the test
and measurement (T&M) indus-try is under great pressure to
deliver highly capable instruments, systems and software.
Strategic electronics, especially aer-ospace and defence, is a
very fastidious
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Technology Focus
19T E S T & M E A S U R E M E N T S P E C I A L
These technological trends have had a far-reaching impact on the
way T&M is being utilised today. Not only have these
advancements helped bring down the test times or cost of
instrumentation, they have also helped in making the
instrumentation easy to use and more efficient. New tech-nologies
help customers discover new alternatives to the traditional ways of
testing, like instruments with multiple capabilities, one-box
testers, automated test set-ups and modular instrumenta-tion,
Awasthi adds.
Here is a quick round-up of the technological trends in test and
meas-urement.
Automation across the lifecycleAutomation is an important
develop-ment in T&M. It relieves the users from routine tasks,
enabling them to focus on innovation. Earlier, there was a lot of
automation in manufacturing, but now measurement automation tasks
are performed at all stages of the prod-uct lifecycle including
research, design verification and production test.
One-touch analysis, multiple-instruments-in-one and fast
measure-ment speeds are some of the trends seen in T&M
automation. Software platforms such as LabVIEW also help in
automating tests by enabling data collection and analysis from
multi-ple sources such as standalone and modular instruments, data
acquisi-tion hardware and cameras. There is also a surge in the
popularity of the PXI platform, which is optimised for automated
test. The modular PXI plat-form provides a solution that is faster,
smaller and more cost-effective than rack-and-stack options.
Prashanth Kaithamana, senior manager-key accounts, Anritsu,
ex-plains a use case in wireless commu-nications: Automation plays
a key role for regression/conformance/carrier acceptance testing
wherein the device-under-test (DUT) needs to be tested against a
series of validated test cases. Engineers feel it cumbersome to
manually test all the test cases one by
one and therefore automation makes the life of the test engineer
easy.
Completely automated labs are there. You just need to connect
the in-puts and the instrument does the entire job with the help of
data acquisition systems and advanced analysis soft-ware. One can
get a complete report of the data and analysis by just pressing a
button. It removes the chances of manipulation and error.
Automation is relatively less in portable instru-ments as compared
to lab instruments but rapidly increasing there too, says
Singh.
A lot of R&D is happening around automation and analysis, to
give the customers a complete solution and val-ue for their
investment in T&M instru-ments. Our organisation too believes
in thisfor example, our vibration, power quality and thermal
imaging solution analyses the data and gives the customer a
solution that helps him to make a quick decision.
Growing importance of softwareSoftware builds up a lot of
support and ease in enhancing the measure-ment and analysis
capability of any
instrument. All good manufacturers in T&M are working on
enhancing their software for more automatic measurements, says
Ambrish Kela, managing director and CEO, Scientech
Technologies.
Software forms an important part of a total solution in the
T&M space. It manifests as design software for de-sign
automation, application software that runs on equipment to help
meet application-specific needs, customised software recipes and
wrappers for automated test needs. It imparts ana-lytical
capability to a test system, mak-ing it more intelligent. An
instrument supported by appropriate software can execute complex
algorithms and give meaningful results, helping customers to
improve their processes and take instantaneous decisions. Software
also helps improve the user interface, mak-ing instruments more
user-friendly and effective.
Eric Wetjen, product marketing manager-Test and Measurement,
MathWorks, explains, In addition to providing a platform for
automation, software allows for custom user-defined measurements
that extend the off-the-shelf capability of instruments.
PXIe-5644R vector signal transceiver by NI
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20 T E S T & M E A S U R E M E N T S P E C I A L
When building a new test system, soft-ware tools can be used to
reduce the all important time to first measurement. In addition,
international instrument driver standards like IVI and LXI save
test engineers time by simplifying soft-ware code maintenance and
enabling adaptive test sequences that minimise test execution
time.
Easy customisation lets users explore solutionsModular hardware,
smart software and common platforms have given rise to easily
customisable and reconfigura-ble test systems that address test
needs to the T. Software-designed instru-mentation and synthetic
instrumenta-tion are two notable swirls created by industry
leaders.
Software-designed instrumenta-tion provides the highest level of
flex-ibility, performance and future-proof-ing possible to date
with off-the-shelf hardware. As system requirements change,
software-designed instruments mean that not only your software
in-vestment will be preserved across dif-ferent pieces of modular
input/output (I/O) but your existing I/O can also be modified
according to the application at hand. To add to all this, it gives
test engineers the ability to take advantage of the performance
provided by the latest PC, CPU and bus technologies, says Satish
Mohanram, business de-velopment manager, National Instru-ments (NI)
India.
In August this year, NI introduced the first software-designed
instru-ment, the PXIe-5644R vector signal transceiver (VST).
Mohanram explains that software-designed instruments feature three
defining characteristics: Instrumentation hardware designed with
Open Source firmware based on FPGAs with out-of-the-box
capa-bilities and rich sample code; well-built system design
software based on LabVIEW to simplify the complexity of designing a
custom hardware in-strument; and a fundamental change in mindset
from integrating a fixed-function device to designing exactly the
instrument one needs.
Another interesting customisation option comes from Agilent.
Synthetic instrumentation is a modular hard-ware and software test
initiative, which involves linking individual hardware and software
test modules together to emulate standard instruments in a new,
compact form factor. The result is a morphable, common system
archi-tecture that enables scalable automated test systems.
A single hardware or software test platform is rarely the right
answer for every test scenario. That is why we fo-cus on modular
products based on the PXI and the new AXIe standard. These modular
form factors enable new capa-bilities that werent previously
possible across analogue, digital, radio fre-quency (RF), microwave
and lightwave technologies. We also focus on con-nected solutions
that unite automated design solutions with simulations that can
include actual measurement equip-ment and devices under testor
their simulations, says Awasthi.
Wetjen points out that software platforms also help string
together cus-tom solutions from off-the-shelf com-ponents. Our
customers often build custom test solutions with off-the shelf
instruments. The customisation is per-formed by the software, which
extends the capability of the instrument. For example, many
oscilloscopes on the market today come with the option to perform
custom analysis in MATLAB and redisplay the channel directly on the
scope, allowing engineers to ex-pand the functionality of
off-the-shelf instruments, he adds.
FPGAs promote customisation and reusabilityThe use of Open
Source, field-pro-grammable gate arrays (FPGAs) is revolutionising
measurement hard-ware to a large extent.
So far FPGAs had been used on T&M equipment only to do
specific high-end processing due to their low latency and high
computational power, but today the evolution of software tools has
enabled customers to define
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Technology Focus
21T E S T & M E A S U R E M E N T S P E C I A L
FPGA functionality with ease. Open, user-programmable FPGAs on
modu-lar instruments enable equipment us-ers to define their custom
processing requirements on the hardware, thereby driving better
productivity (both in terms of throughput and test coverage) and
reusability through re-configura-bility (and hence lower cost of
capital equipment), explains Mohanram.
NIs new VST mentioned earlier is also an exemplary use of FPGAs.
This device combines the functionalities of a vector signal
generator and a vector signal analyser, and contains a
user-programmable FPGA for real-time signal processing and digital
input/output for digital control. With the added flexibility of an
FPGA, the VST is ideal for custom triggering, DUT control, parallel
measurements and real-time digital signal processing.
With the availability of end-user-accessible FPGAs on test
instruments, there is a trend towards providing the test engineer
the ability to customise the signal processing that occurs on the
instrument. We expect more engineers to take advantage of this
combined with automated code generation over the next few years,
says Wetjen.
Growing demands of wireless testingThe evolution in mobile
networks is forcing T&M manufacturers to come
up with innovative solutions for test-ing across the wireless
value chain.
Test equipment are needed by network operators to assist them in
debugging new network features, interoperability analysis,
acceptance testing, quality-of-service analysis and network
performance optimisa-tion. They often need to analyse data from
oscilloscopes and spectrum analysers with increasingly higher
bandwidths and deeper on-board memory. They are also involved in
developing and testing software-defined radios or custom
communi-cations schemes. In some cases, they must create and
transmit complex arbitrary waveforms to test receiver algorithms or
collect data on a spec-trum analyser to verify the perfor-mance of
a transmitter.
In mobile phone test systems, there has been a huge demand in
de-termining communications protocols from the earliest stages. As
a result, T&M companies have to provide measuring equipment
with the high-est number of approved conform-ance tests of
transmission protocols between base stations and mobile handsets.
Manufacturers of mobile handsets and chipsets throughout the world
need fast and reliable measur-ing instruments to test mobile
hand-sets because handsets that pass are recognised as
3GPP-compatible. This
contributes to the smooth growth and development of 2G/3G mobile
phone systems. A similar activity has to continue in LTE as well.
For wireline systems, there has been a huge de-mand in
standardisation of jitter and wander2 measurement technologies,
says Kaithamana.
T&M companies are already tun-ing up to the LTE-Advanced
features that could create a large volume of business in the coming
times. In ad-dition to dramatically increasing data transmission
speed, LTE-Advanced is emerging as a key technology for realising
the seamless convergence of wireline and wireless networks as it is
based on the Internet Protocol (IP). LTE measurement represents a
substantial business opportunity with the potential of becoming a
pil-lar of growth for the next ten years or more.
Many-in-one instrumentsHigh levels of integration and
min-iaturisation have made it possible to pack many instruments
into one unit of manageable form factor. Agilents N6705B DC power
analyser is one such example. It integrates up to four advanced
power supplies with digital multimeter, scope, arbitrary waveform
generator and data logger features. It eliminates the need to put
together multiple pieces of equipment and
Agilents N6705B DC power analyser with 14585A control and
analysis software
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Technology Focus
22 T E S T & M E A S U R E M E N T S P E C I A L
create complex test setups including transducers (such as
current probes and shunts) to measure current into your DUT. The DC
power analyser also eliminates the need to develop and debug
programs to control a col-lection of instruments and take useful
measurements because all functions and measurements are available
at the front panel.
Agilents new FieldFox range is another interesting many-in-one
exam-ple. FieldFox microwave analysers can be configured as
cable-and-antenna analysers, spectrum analysers, vector network
analysers or all-in-one com-bination analysers. Each compact, 3kg
package is available in four frequen-cies: 9, 14, 18 and 26.5
GHz.
In the recent past, we have seen mixed-domain instruments that
cater to analogue, digital and RF measure-ments in an integrated
housing. Anoth-er new trend has been in multi-utility PC-based
instruments that include an oscilloscope, a DDS function generator,
a programmable power supply, etc. Such multi-utility instruments
are becoming quite popular for R&D pur-poses, says Kela.
Other trends1. Instruments with Ethernet and wire-less
interfaces are coming up. Wireless interface is especially helpful
for on-field T&M.
2. Device displays are improving greatlythis is very helpful for
in-struments that provide graphical and visual analytical features
for users. We see companies including best-in-class display
technologies like organic light-emitting diode (OLED).
3. Widespread use of parametric analysers for solar cell,
nanotechnology and material science research.
4. Emergence of low-power (e.g., USB-powered) scopes and other
meas-urement hardware that can be used with mobile phones, tablets
and other handheld PCs.
5. Use of MEMS devices in hand-held and portable/field-usable
instru-ments as these are small and robust, requiring little power
while also of-
fering surprisingly high performance. 6. Use of green
technologies in
the design and manufacture of test systems.
7. Smaller chips, better power management technologies,
extremely capable yet light software have led to portable,
multi-utility, handheld analysers that perform on par with
traditional bench systems.
8. GPS functionality in field instru-ments for location-specific
analysis of data gathered.
9. A lot of effort concerning mobile connectivityand special
interest in making systems work with tablet PCs. Over the past
year, there have been examples of how this could work, but there is
still a lot of flux regard-ing how data collection, secure data
storage (on or off the cloud) and data analysis will all work
together. There is increasing interest in storing test data in the
cloud, as well as for monitoring tests and acquiring data using
tablet computers.
In short, the T&M world is inno-vating rapidly to handle the
changing requirements of customer industries. There are challenges
aplenty and op-portunities as well. One major secret to success at
the moment would be to understand the customers complete value
chain and provide products that cater to the full product
lifecycle.
With the widespread acceptance of model-based design in research
and development, the product develop-ment cycle has been
significantly ac-celerated. Today, the first prototype of product
hardware is often much closer to the final shipping design than in
the past. This reduces the time available for traditional T&M
verification and validation techniques, and the time available for
development of produc-tion test systems. T&M practitioners must
look for ways to develop and conduct their tests earlier in the
de-velopment cycle, and forge a stronger relationship with upstream
design teams, says Wetjen.
The author is a technically-qualified freelance writer, editor
and hands-on mom based in Chennai
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TesT & measurement
23T E S T & M E A S U R E M E N T S P E C I A L
The new generation of consumer electronics devices converge
Internet connectivity, wireless communications, high-fidelity audio
and HD video into a single device. To keep up with the times,
different strategies have been adopted by test and measurement
manufacturers and design houses. Take a look
Top 6 Trends in Test & Measurement
Dilin AnAnD
FPGA-enabled instrumentation1With the increase in system-level
tools for field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) over the last few
years, an increasing number of manu-facturers are including FPGAs
in in-strumentation. Whats more, engineers are given the choice to
reprogram these FPGAs according to their requirements. So test
engineers can embed a custom algorithm into the device to perform
in-line processing inside the FPGA, or even emulate part of the
system that requires a real-time response.
Satish Thakare, head-R&D, VLSI di-vision, Scientech
Technologies, explains the traditional challenges that led to this
trend: Designers and manufacturers have to face a lot of challenges
to make the product available in the market in a
short time. Using a hardware-based ap-proach does not serve the
purpose as the designer has to redesign the hardware for every
product. Even conventional meth-ods will not serve the purpose as
it works on the sequential method. So the design-ers need a kind of
technology that allows them to change the functionality without
changing the hardware while being able to upgrade the product on
the go.
Thakare goes on to explain the so-lution: The obvious choice for
the de-signer is to use reconfigurable hard-ware, i.e., FPGA. A
benefit of using the FPGA in the instruments is that it offers high
reliability, low latency, reconfigurability, high performance,
embedded digital signal processor (DSP) core and true
parallelism.
Apart from digital functions, some FPGAs have analogue features.
Some mixed-signal FPGAs may have inte-grated analogue-to-digital
converters and digital-to-analogue converters.
Mahendra Pratap Singh, business development manager, TTL
Technolo-gies, adds, Logic blocks can be config-ured to perform
complex combinational functions and also include memory ele-ments,
which can be simple flip-flops or more complete blocks of memory.
The architectural flexibility, customisation flexibility and cost
advantage put FPGAs ahead of complementary technologies.
The most common test instrument in the industry with this
capability is the digitiser, which allows faster processing of
digitised data.
Wireless standards outbreak
As new wireless standards like the WLAN 802.11ac, WiMAX, LTE and
high-throughput 802.11ad roll out, it becomes even more challenging
for test engineers in India and around the globe. Bharti Airtel has
already launched its 4G service in Kolkata, making India one of the
first countries in the world to commercially deploy this
cutting-edge wireless technology. As RF and wireless applications
expand to become general-purpose, the instrumentation segment might
also begin to mirror this trend with the adoption of RF
instrumentation to such a level that it becomes as impor-tant as
our digital multimeters.
A common problem that test
engineers face with the explosion of different standards is that
they have to continuously set up different test platforms for each
standard.
Sadaf Arif Siddiqui, technical marketing specialist at Agilent
Tech-nologies, provides more insight: A test engineer working on
fast emerging standards may have to bear the pain of setting up
different test instruments and different test platforms or
software. Moving to an easy-to-use, upgradeable and multi-standard
vector signal analy-sis software and instruments such as X-series
analysers will reduce this pain and test times to a large extent,
thereby optimising the test time and costs.
Agilent Technologies flexible signal analysers for essential RF
measurements (Image courtesy: Agilent Technologies, Inc.)
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TesT & measurement
24 T E S T & M E A S U R E M E N T S P E C I A L
Software-defined instrumentation
As the complexity of products con-tinues to increase, their
testing becomes much more challenging. Test engineers now require
test systems that are flexible enough to support the wide variety
of tests that must be performed on a single product while being
scalable enough to encompass a larger number of tests as new
func-tionality continues to be added.
Increasingly, the functionality of complex devices is being
defined by the software embedded in them. This is challenging for
many test engineers because most standalone instruments cannot
change their functionality as fast as changes in the device under
test (DUT) due to the fixed user interface and firmware that must
be developed and embedded in the instrument. Thus test engineers
are turning to a software-defined approach to instrumentation, so
that they can quickly customise their equipment to meet specific
application needs and integrate testing directly into the design
process, says Eric Starkloff, director of NI Test Product
Marketing.
Thakare shares two major advan-tages of software-defined
instrumenta-tion: First, it can dramatically reduce the number of
hardware components in all the mixed-signal designs, which means
smaller chip size for system-on-chip implementation. Second, it can
provide automatic adjustment or com-pensation for circuit component
varia-tions due to temperature dependence, ageing and manufacturing
tolerances.
Software-defined instrumentation looks to become an essential
component of scalable and highly performing test systems. Singh
agrees by saying, We predict a bright future for software-defined
instrumentation. Software-defined instruments, also known as
virtual instruments, are modular hard-ware with user-defined
software giv-
ing the flexibility to combine standard and user-defined
measurements with custom data processing using common hardware
components. This flexibility is useful for electronic devices like
ad-vanced navigation systems and com-munication devices like
smartphones to integrate diverse capabilities and adopt new
communication standards.
Test engineering: A strategic assetAccording to NIs recent
global survey of test engineering leaders, a shift has emerged
within electronics manufacturing firms wherein they are now using
product test for competitive differentiation. This shift culminates
in an elevation of the test engineering function to become a
strategic asset to the company. The test participants of the survey
said that their primary goal over the next few years was to
reorganise their test organisation structures for enhanced
efficiency.
(Source: NI Automated Test Outlook 2012)
Software-defined instrumentation by NI (Image courtesy:
www.ni.com)
Increased use of wireless devices at the workplace
Tablet computers and smartphones have become so popular that
they have a significant presence at the workplace toonot as devices
under test but as part of the test system. While the computing
power made available by these devices is nota-ble, they cannot
replace the PC and related measurement platforms like
PXi. Instead, these devices are suit-able for data consumption
and report viewing, and system monitoring and control.
National Instruments Automated Test Outlook 2012 explains: The
ex-plosion of mobile devices like tablets and smartphones provides
compel-ling benefits to engineers, technicians
and managers involved in automated test who need remote access
to test status information and results. While todays technology
offers solutions for monitoring or remote reporting via mobile
devices, test organisations will need new expertise to unite the
networking, Web services and mobile app portions of the
solution.
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TesT & measurement
25T E S T & M E A S U R E M E N T S P E C I A L
The author is tech correspondent at EFY Bengaluru
Use of multicore and parallel test systems
As the complexity and func-tionality of electronic devices grow
exponentially (in sync with Moores law), so does the cost of
testing them. Minimising the cost of test can be challenging, but
one way is to test more with less. The inherent parallelism that is
made available by the graphical program-ming paradigm of software
like La-bVIEW from National Instruments and FlowStone DSP from DSP
Ro-botics helps engineers immediately benefit from multicore
processors and overcome the complexity as-sociated with traditional
text-based languages.
The trend of increasing clock speed to get better performance
ended back in the early 2000s. Since then, processor manufactur-ers
have implemented alternate technologies to ramp up perfor-mance
while keeping the clock speeds around 3 GHz. These
technologies include the use of processors with multiple cores
on a single chip, hyperthreading, wider buses and hyper transport.
Moreover, the advancement of the process node to the current 22nm
process by utilising 3D transistors has resulted in significantly
faster, leaner and more efficient proces-sors for use in embedded
control-lers and modular instrumentation.
Denver DSouza, senior techni-cal consultant at National
Instru-ments India, says, The reality that transistor density
doubles every 18 months has led to significant advances in the
performance of electronic devices. This is evident not only in the
latest Intel Core i7 processors but in the shrinking of technology
such as 64GB solidstate drives, which are now the size of a postage
stamp. These technological advances translate into consider-able
cost reductions.
5
Merging of EDA tools and hardware test platforms
The extremely competitive environ-ment in which electronics
compa-nies work now is shown by how next-generation communication
protocols are barely labeled as standards before they can be seen
in the market. For instance, the 802.11ac solutions have already
been brought out by Broadcom even though it is yet to be ratified.
In situations like these, companies go all out to get a jumpstart
on the competi-tion, and what better way to do this than to merge
design and testing in order to accelerate the time to market.
Adesh Jain, applications con-sultant at Agilent Technologies,
ex-plains why the traditional method is slow: Traditionally, for
any complete electronic product to be ready for the market, each
compo-nent of the complete system is first
designed and verified with EDA tools, then prototypes are
fabri-cated and tested, before the final product is released to the
market. If discrepancies are found in the hardware at later stages,
the whole cycle has to be repeated, which would result in loss of
time as well as money for any organisation.
Proper verification at earlier stages reduces this time and
effort to a great extent. The tests, specs, algorithms and plots
used in the early stages of EDA are the same as measured on the
test bench. The aim is to merge both the worlds and see if it is
possible to save the design engi-neers time by streamlining the
flow and thus improve productivity while reducing the time to get
the product out to the market.
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26 T E S T & M E A S U R E M E N T S P E C I A L
Uma GUpta
testinG in manUfactUre During manufacture, testing adds to the
cost of the final product significantly. sometimes the cost of
testing can be even greater than the cost of product manufacturing
itself. test and measurement manufacturers have been quick to
respond by coming up with innovative ways to lower the test cost
and increase throughput
Testing is a critical component of product development and
production process. It can im-prove a products performance,
increase quality and reliability, and lower return rates. It is
estimated that the cost of fail-ure decreases ten times when an
error is caught during production instead of the field, and
decreases ten times again if it is caught in design instead of
produc-tion. By catching these defects and col-lecting the data to
improve a design or process, test delivers value to an
organi-sation. At the same time, manufacturing tests add to the
cost of the final product.
So its time to drive innovation into this process through
technology insertion and best-practice methodologies in order to
generate large efficiency gains and cost reductions.
testers usedManufacturing a product involves a lot of in-line
equipment. In a surface-mount technology (SMT) line, not one
machine is capable of handling the entire process. There are
various machines used for various purposes. Roughly, a basic SMT
line requires a printer, a mounter and a reflow oven to give an
assembly output. To reduce the final cost, certain measurements
can be done on the manufacturing line itself.
R.S. Gupta, senior manager-Sales & Marketing, DVS India,
informs that manufacturers have started using high-quality,
repeatable printers capable of 2.5D and 3D inspection of the paste
printing itself, so no separate testing is required at this stage.
The printer introduces almost 60-65 per cent of the problems of the
process in line. So by taking care of the first stage, your product
doesnt show up the kinds of problems that are incorporated at the
first stage. Problems detected at an ear-lier stage can be
corrected at a very low cost. This reduces the final product
cost.
Once the product comes out of as-sembly, the manufacturer does
various kinds of testing to check whether the product is
manufactured as per the requirements or not. Testing is done for
manufacturing defects and functionality.
During the product assembly, some problems may get incorporated
due to human or machine mistake, or due to a faulty part put on the
assembly from the suppliers side. Out of a thousand components, one
or two parts may be failing. As component manufacturers today are
taking a lot of care, this is very rare. So it may not be failure
from the suppliers side but there are devices which are very
electrostatic discharge (ESD) sensitive and may fail when han-dled
with bare hands. Also, the process itself may fail due to
over-heating, etc.
The basic requirement of testing an assembly is to detect
whether the prod-uct is free from manufacturing defects or not. It
is the cheapest testing carried out in an assembly. It detects
whether
SMT testing
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27T E S T & M E A S U R E M E N T S P E C I A L
the component used is correct or placed correctly. Apart from
these component problems, there could be soldering-side problems as
well. When solder is used in excess it could create a bridge
between two nearby pins, while less sol-der creates a dry point.
Manufacturing defect testers detect the analogue com-ponent type
and its value, but cant test digital components. These arent very
costly either. One can use manufactur-ing defect analysers (MDAs),
flying probe testers (FPTs), automated optical inspection (AOI)
systems or automated X-ray inspection testers depending on the
equipments return on investment. Of these, manufacturing defect
analys-ers are the cheapest.
In the same kind of environment, one can even use a high-end
tester called in-circuit tester (ICT). An ICT is a full-capacity
tester capable of testing analogue, digital and mixed-signal
devices. It costs ten times more than an MDA. The rate of fault
detection is very high using an ICT. So a manufac-turer using an
ICT charges more for its products. Besides doing what an MDA does,
the ICT performs power-on testing as well. That is, when you apply
the power, it checks individual components on the assembly for
their functionality (whether they are per-forming as per their
specifications or not). It, however, cant test the full product for
its functionality.
ICTs are very generic. These are user-programmable. You can use
an ICT to test different components by using a dedicated fixture
and program written for the PCB. The fixture ensures electrical
connection between the assembly and the tester. These fixtures and
programs are very dedicated. That means if you have a product with
ten components, you need ten fixtures and ten programs for
component testing. Of course, even a manufacturing defect analyser
requires a dedicated fixture and program but these two cost very
less. For ICT the cost is higher due to full power-on testing.
Next comes the funct