A New Era of Electronic Measurement Automation (EMA)

The rapid growth in semiconductor technology is driving an unprecedented insertion of new functionality in today’s electronic products. Mobile phones, for example, no longer serve as simple audio transceivers but rather as mobile entertainment systems through built-in MP3, GPS, PDA, 802.11, Bluetooth, and digital camera functionality. During the past 10 to 15 years, electronic design automation (EDA) vendors have pushed to deliver design engineers the necessary improvements in schematic layout and simulation tools to keep up with the growth in semiconductor technology. As a result, the bottleneck in today’s design process is often the physical measurement and characterization of design prototypes. The traditional approach to design verification and characterization is to perform a series of manual measurements using benchtop instruments in a design lab. The result is a growing gap in productivity between the automated EDA tools and the manual measurement and data collection processes currently used in design verification and characterization.

A new approach to streamline measurements in the design flow is electronic measurement automation (EMA). EMA provides the essential measurement technologies to enable design engineers to maintain superior test coverage, quality, and on-time delivery despite the increasing functionality of today’s electronics products. Specifically, EMA is the application of automated, software-defined measurements in the modeling, verification, and characterization phases of electronic design. The application of EMA tools and strategies provide several key benefits to design engineers aiming to close the gap between design and test productivity.

Introduction

The rapid growth in semiconductor technology is driving an unprecedented insertion of new functionality in today’s electronic products. Mobile phones, for example, no longer serve as simple audio transceivers but rather as mobile entertainment systems through built-in MP3, GPS, PDA, 802.11, Bluetooth, and digital camera functionality. During the past 10 to 15 years, EDA vendors have pushed to deliver design engineers the necessary improvements in schematic layout and simulation tools to keep up with the growth in semiconductor technology. As a result, the bottleneck in today’s design process is often the physical measurement and characterization of design prototypes. The traditional approach to design verification and characterization is to perform a series of manual measurements using benchtop instruments in a design lab. The result is a growing gap in productivity between the automated EDA tools and the manual measurement and data collection processes currently used in design verification and characterization.

A new approach to streamline measurements in the design flow is EMA, which provides the essential measurement technologies to enable design engineers to maintain superior test coverage, quality, and on-time delivery despite the increasing functionality of today’s electronics products. Specifically, EMA is the application of automated, software-defined measurements in the modeling, verification, and characterization phases of electronic design. The application of EMA tools and strategies provide several key benefits to design engineers aiming to close the gap between design and test productivity.

Firstly, the software-centric approach to measurement with EMA tools enables design engineers to instantly compare simulated results with measured results. This feature saves design engineers a tremendous amount of time otherwise spent trying to store measured results to file from benchtop instruments and determining the differences in results by printing graphs in Excel and holding two sheets of paper up to the light. Furthermore, EMA tools can assist design engineers by improving their circuit simulation models through instantly storing measured results to file so design engineers can import the measured results back into the design software. The software-based EMA approach also delivers increased repeatability and consistency in measurements between design iterations by providing a way to store software-defined measurement tasks for future use. In addition, EMA tools deliver improved connectivity to industry-leading test software used in automated validation and manufacturing test. This helps assure design engineers that measurements being performed in validation and manufacturing test are the same as the measurements they defined to verify the product functionality in the design process.

Evolution of Virtual Instrumentation Technology

Industry-proven virtual instrumentation technology serves as the backbone of EMA tools for design verification and characterization. Virtual instrumentation was originally introduced by National Instruments in the mid-1970s as a means of automating measurements by connecting early personal computers with benchtop instruments through the IEEE 488 bus (GPIB). NI continued to innovate on the concept of virtual instrumentation through the introduction of LabVIEW graphical programming and PC-based measurement hardware during the 1980s. The steady growth and adoption of LabVIEW and virtual instrumentation contributed to many innovative breakthroughs in the test and measurement industry throughout the 1990s and 2000s, including user-reconfigurable FPGA-based modular instruments and personal data assistant (PDA) based measurement devices. Today, virtual instrumentation technology is being used by more than 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies.

Interestingly, virtual instrumentation has not historically been used for performing electronic measurements in the design phase of the product development cycle. Virtual instrumentation in electronics test has primarily been applied in automated validation and manufacturing test systems because of the dramatic time and cost savings it provides in reducing the programming and integration effort in automating measurements. The recent measurement productivity challenges in the design community are similar to the productivity challenges test engineers have faced for many years in validation and manufacturing test. There is now a clear opportunity to apply virtual instrumentation technologies in design through EMA technologies. The application of virtual instrumentation-based EMA tools used in conjunction with EDA tools will deliver tremendous productivity enhancements to today’s design engineers and help bridge the gap between design and test.

Similar Trends in Design Automation

Industry trends driving the adoption of EMA tools closely follow that of the popular EDA tools widely used in the chip design industry today. EDA tools emerged in the early 1980s in response to the needs of chip designers faced with the constant doubling of the number of transistors per design every 18 months as predicted by Moore's Law. Prior to the introduction of EDA tools, more primitive methods of chip design and layout were used. Some of these methods consisted of low-level computer-aided design (CAD) tools developed as far back as 1959 with the introduction of the first integrated circuit board [1]. After nearly two decades of applying traditional chip design techniques, many chip designers were experiencing a major gap between transistor density per chip and the design productivity of the current CAD tools. As a result, several leading semiconductor software companies began developing new, innovative technologies that could be applied to the existing CAD tools to greatly improve the productivity of chip designers by further automating the chip design process. The resulting productivity increases were achieved by further abstracting the chip design process to vastly improve the automatic circuit layout and simulation of signals in the complex designs. The EDA tools used widely today are a result of the application of core technologies designed to improve the productivity of chip design engineers through increased design automation. The migration from CAD tools to the latest EDA tools is nearly identical to the emerging transition from manual, benchtop testing in circuit board design to the use of EMA tools based on core virtual instrumentation technology.

Industry Trends Driving New Era in Design and Test

In addition to the similar relationship between design and test, there are many additional industry trends pointing to the start of a new era in the adoption of EMA tools in product design and test. The continued growth in GPIB sales and usage in the industry is an excellent data point to illustrate the growing usage of PC-based instrument control, the first step towards adopting EMA processes. The most recent report from Frost & Sullivan on the instrument control market provides further support that the GPIB market is still growing [2]. There is also an estimated 35 to 40 percent of instruments today already being controlled using a computer and GPIB or serial interface. This number is expected to grow with the steady growth in GPIB. PC-based PXI systems also experienced 27.8 and 37.8 percent revenue growth respectively in 2002 and 2003, according to Frost & Sullivan [3]. Furthermore, PC-based test is widely viewed among design and test engineers to deliver the most technological advances during the next five years, according to a recent survey by Test & Measurement World magazine [4].

Similarly, there is a sharp rise in the number of test equipment vendors who are adding PC-based software and hardware components to traditional benchtop instruments to deliver a similar, although not equivalent, PC-based measurement automation experience similar to virtual instrumentation based EMA. Examples of these instruments are the Open Windows Oscilloscopes available through Tektronix which come standard with a fully functional built-in PC running Windows XP.

Additionally, the Test & Measurement World survey indicated that more than 50 percent of design and test engineers today are working more closely together than two years prior [4]. This result illustrates new efforts on behalf of design and test managers to streamline the development and test of new products. Several leading electronics manufacturers have already begun to couple the team efforts in design and test with EMA based tools and technologies to gain significant competitive advantages in shortened product development cycles, improved design quality, and decreased costs.

The widespread adoption of virtual instrumentation technology for developing EMA systems for use throughout the product development cycle is becoming increasingly evident by the dwindling of many “big iron”, proprietary automated test equipment (ATE) systems throughout validation and manufacturing test. This is the direct result of continued innovation in virtual instrumentation to simplify the development of automated test programs for validation and manufacturing test. These new technologies substantially lower the barrier of automation for design engineers who have not traditionally been able to justify the use of increased measurement automation due to the complex programming and system development involved with traditional benchtop instruments.

Several leading consumer electronic manufacturers also have indicated to National Instruments that they are actively searching for disruptive technologies to dramatically boost measurement productivity in design. These companies realize design engineers are constantly pushed to integrate new functionality into their designs incorporating bleeding edge technology that very few design engineers are familiar with. Without a new approach to design verification and characterization, this requires adding project development time to compensate for the learning curve associated with incorporating and testing new technologies going into a design.

One recent example of this is the rapid adoption of the RF identification tags (RFID). The new RFID technology represents a golden, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for electronics companies to be a leader in integrating RFID technology into their product designs, but not without a substantial amount of research and learning on the part of design engineers. Therefore, design engineers working on RFID designs will greatly benefit from an EMA-based approach to modeling, verifying, and characterizing their designs to streamline the test and measurement portion of their design project. Without an EMA approach to test, the company will likely be forced to make the decision on whether to extend the length of the project and risk not being first to market, or sacrifice product quality by reducing test coverage.

New Virtual Instrumentation Technology Connects Design and Test

Despite the overwhelming success of virtual instrumentation technology in validation and manufacturing test, virtual instrumentation has not traditionally met the needs of design engineers because it lacked the truly interactive, “always on” look and feel provided by most traditional benchtop instruments. LabVIEW SignalExpress, a new interactive measurement software tool, was developed by NI specifically to provide an enhanced benchtop measurement experience for today’s design engineers. The application of EMA tools such as NI LabVIEW SignalExpress delivers an exponential increase design engineering productivity through increased automation and abstraction of measurements in design.

NI LabVIEW SignalExpress Enhances the Benchtop Measurement Experience

National Instruments LabVIEW SignalExpress is the key to delivering the maximum benefits of virtual instrumentation for EMA in design. LabVIEW SignalExpress provides a truly interactive, nonprogramming measurement experience that relates to the familiar look and feel of traditional benchtop instruments. The unique difference is that LabVIEW SignalExpress is built on virtual instrumentation technology, which provides design engineers the essential capabilities they need to increase their productivity in testing early design prototypes. In addition to the nonprogramming, interactive software environment, LabVIEW SignalExpress also offers tight integration with the leading circuit design and modeling tools, including Orcad SPICE and PSpice and Multisim from Electronics Workbench, to enable design engineers to easily compare simulated results with their real-world measurements. Engineers can also export their measurements to file for loading measured signals back into the design software tools. This feature removes a tremendous amount of development time and eliminates the guess work in comparing real-world circuit behavior with the expected simulation results. Reloading the exported measurement data back in the design software tools also assists engineers in improving their circuit models, which cuts down on the number of prototypes required during the design process. LabVIEW SignalExpress also provides built-in connectivity to an industry-standard test software environment, NI LabVIEW, which enables design engineers to quickly create user-defined functions for custom measurement, analysis, and processing unique to their measurement application. Design engineers can also convert their LabVIEW SignalExpress projects to LabVIEW VIs for extended reuse of particular measurements in the more highly automated validation and manufacturing test phases of the product development cycle. The combination of these three core LabVIEW SignalExpress features is the key to delivering design engineers an EMA solution for closing the productivity gap between design and test.

Complete NI Test Platform for Next-Generation EMA

In addition to LabVIEW SignalExpress, NI provides an entire suite of modular test and measurement software and hardware designed specifically for measurement automation in design, validation, and manufacturing test applications. From world-class modular instruments for measuring signals from DC to 2.7 GHz, to industry-leading software such as NI TestStand test management software, and our LabVIEW graphical development environment, NI has maintained a 30 year vision toward using commercial, off-the-shelf (COTS) technology to deliver virtual instrumentation technology that significantly improves productivity.

Summary

Virtual instrumentation represents the essential technologies for assisting design and test engineers in streamlining their entire product development cycle through increased integration with existing design and manufacturing software. EMA tools such as LabVIEW SignalExpress and NI modular instruments provide design engineers the highest level of connectivity with existing design and test tools. The new EMA-based approach to test in the design flow finally represents a solution to a three decades old dilemma of connecting design and test by providing opportunities for design engineers to insert new technology and functionality into a design with the confidence of maintaining superior test coverage, excellent quality, and on-time delivery.

References

[1] “EDA – Where Electronics Begins”, http://www.edac.org/
[2] “World VXI and PXI Test and Measurement Equipment Markets”, Frost & Sullivan, 2001
[3] “World VXI and PXI Test and Measurement Equipment Markets”, Frost & Sullivan, 2004
[4] “Profile of the Test Engineer Survey”, 2003, Test & Measurement World

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