Top Five Trends in Test and Measurement

NI has been a leader in test and measurement for many years, and our broad reach across industries and applications, large customer base, and significant investment in new technology gives us unique visibility into trends driving this industry. We have identified five trends that we anticipate will significantly influence test and measurement over the next few years. All of these trends fundamentally tie back to a need to increase efficiency – reducing test costs while improving productivity to keep up with increasing design complexity.

Increased Use of Multicore/Parallel Test Systems

To continue realizing performance gains without increased clock rates, processor manufacturers are developing processors with multiple cores on a single chip. With multicore processors, test engineers can develop automated test applications capable of achieving the highest possible throughput through parallel processing. The inherent parallelism of graphical dataflow software like NI LabVIEW helps engineers immediately benefit from multicore processors and overcome the complexity associated with traditional text-based languages. 

Growth of Software-Defined Instrumentation

Increasingly, the functionality of complex devices is being defined by the software embedded in them. This is challenging for many test engineers because most stand-alone instruments cannot change their functionality as fast as changes in the 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 they can quickly customize their equipment to meet specific application needs and integrate testing directly into the design process.

Growing Popularity of FPGA-Enabled Instrumentation

With the increase in system-level tools for field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), more manufacturers are including FPGAs on modular instruments and giving engineers the access in software to reprogram them according to their requirements. For example, test engineers can embed a custom algorithm into the device to perform in-line processing inside the FPGA or emulate part of the system that requires a real-time response. New system-level tools are emerging so engineers can rapidly configure FPGAs without writing low-level VHDL code.

The Explosion of Wireless Standards

Test engineers are facing new challenges as the use of RF and wireless applications is expanding. RF and wireless traditionally have been very specialized fields, but the industry is seeing wireless capabilities integrated into more and more products. Soon, RF instrumentation could become as ubiquitous as general-purpose instruments such as digital multimeters. This growth in adoption requires test engineers to learn wireless protocols and keep pace with the rapid introduction of new standards.

Emulation-Based ATE for System-on-a-Chip (SoC), System-in-a-Package (SiP) Testing

Complex SoCs and SiPs require a system-level functional test more closely related to testing components placed on a printed circuit board than a typical vector-based chip test, but they still require the high speeds demanded in production test for the semiconductor industry. The strategy of testing a device by emulating actual real-world signals provides a better method of functional test for these types of high-speed systems. This emulation-based ATE combines FPGA-based hardware to offer real-time responses and real-world interfacing with the standard pin electronics found in traditional ATE.

By taking advantage of these trends, we believe that companies can gain a market advantage in reducing their costs, improving product quality, and decreasing time to market.

 -- Eric Starkloff

Eric Starkloff is the director of NI test product marketing. He has helped drive industry standards in groups such as the PXI Systems Alliance and sits on the Wireless Networking and Communications Group board at The University of Texas at Austin. He received a bachelor’s in electrical engineering from the University of Virginia.

Visit Eric Starkloff’s automated test blog for a discussion of trends in test and measurement.

This article first appeared in the 1-15-08 issue of NI News and later ran in the Q1 2008 issue of Instrumentation Newsletter.

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vhdl
There is one thing I want to add: VHDL is not "low level programming". Low level programming uses transistor functions, boolean expressions and register transfers. VHDL uses algorithms.
- Jan 15, 2008