Guest commentary: PCI Express, multicore processors, and FPGAs drive Instrumentation 2.0
Eric Starkloff, National Instruments -- Test & Measurement World, 5/16/2007 8:16:00 AM
Editor’s note: This article is part 1 in a series on Instrumentation 2.0. Read part 2 (on PCI Express) and part 3 (on FPGAs).
Test instrumentation is undergoing a fundamental change—from fixed-functionality standalone instruments to flexible software-based devices that can be redefined by the user. While instruments have been around a lot longer than the Web, the Web community is currently focused on a similar trend toward user-empowerment, called
. In the same vein, a software-based approach to instrumentation inherently empowers users to build custom instrumentation to meet their unique application needs; therefore, I call this approach Instrumentation 2.0.
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ERIC STARKLOFF National Instruments Director of Product Marketing |
The technology behind Instrumentation 2.0 has been around for many years. You may have heard the term virtual instrumentation before, for example. Recently, however, Instrumentation 2.0 has been gaining momentum. The US Department of Defense has dictated that its future test equipment will use software-based, reconfigurable instrumentation and has deployed trial systems that have demonstrated distinct advantages over traditional instruments in size and flexibility.
With an Instrumentation 2.0 approach, you use generic hardware components to digitize or generate a signal. Raw data is passed over a high-speed bus to a general-purpose processor where custom software analysis routines turn the raw data into the required measurement. For example, consider an RF measurement system that can be reconfigured to test any wireless system. This may consist of a block downconverter and digitizer connected to a processor over a high-speed bus capable of transferring the digitized data in real time, such as PCI Express. A software tool is used to perform user-defined analysis to create the required measurements. NI LabView, for example, includes routines for modulation and decoding that can create a software-defined RF test system for measuring Bluetooth, 802.11, GSM, and other wireless standards. By creating these routines in software that uses common hardware components, there is a significant savings in cost and size.
Instrumentation 2.0 is made possible by tremendous advancement of technologies in software, processing, data buses, and reprogrammable silicon. The pace of innovation in these technologies, driven by the PC and other commercial industries, has been staggering: PC processors, for example, have increased five orders of magnitude (or over 10,000 times!) over the past 20 years. The result has been a constantly increasing sophistication of applications that can be solved by a software-defined approach using low-cost commercial technologies. In the 1980s, this approach was deployed primarily for sensor data-acquisition applications; the relatively low bandwidth and data processing of these applications could be solved using the PCs of the day. Today, using the latest commercial data converters, multi-core processors, the high-bandwidth PCI Express bus, and even on-board FPGA-based processing, the same approach can now be used to create some of the highest performance test systems available. For example, the Instrumentation 2.0 approach is being used to create the world’s most accurate audio measurements, to test wireless devices on a high-volume manufacturing line, and to characterize mixed signal semiconductors. In all of these applications, the use of a software-defined approach built on commercial technologies enables greater flexibility, higher performance, and lower cost.
In a series of three additional articles to appear over the next three months, my colleagues and I will examine in detail three of the fundamental technologies driving Instrumentation 2.0:
•
(posted June 28),
• FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays), and
• multi-core processors.
For each, we will show how you can use the technology in your test systems to lower costs and increase performance.
Eric Starkloffis director of product marketing at National Instruments.
See related articles on Instrumentation 2.0 here and here.
Read more guest commentaries here.
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