From software to RF
Test Engineer of the Year: Lisa Moder ensures the quality of EchoStar’s set-top boxes at manufacturing facilities around the world.
Rick Nelson -- Test & Measurement World, 4/1/2010 12:00:00 AM
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Englewood, CO—EchoStar Technologies employs nearly 2400 people worldwide to develop and market its line of set-top boxes, including ones that incorporate technology from Sling Media, which EchoStar purchased in 2007. With products like EchoStar’s SlingLoaded set-top box, consumers can view their satellite, cable, or off-air programs from the comfort of their living rooms or from anywhere in the world where an Internet connection is available.
The benefits of Sling technology are not lost on senior test engineer Lisa Moder, who spends significant time on the road working with EchoStar’s contract manufacturers around the world, ensuring that their test lines are up and running successfully. Speaking of her engineering team, she said, “Traveling around the way we do, we bring our own personal Slingboxes that we can tap into from anywhere in the world. It lets us bring a little bit of home with us. It’s nice to be able to tap in and watch shows from home.”
The results can be a little disconcerting for family members, though. Moder said, “When I’m 14 hours away and changing channels, the kids are home sitting in the living room and wondering what’s going on with the TV.” And they can voice their consternation via a pop-up message that appears on Moder’s screen. Fortunately for her family, Moder’s life on the road often involves 16-hour days working with contract manufacturers, which doesn’t leave much time for channel surfing, and the kids can watch their movies uninterrupted.
When Moder is not on the road, she is involved in planning and implementing test strategies while dealing with a variety of challenges unique to the set-top box industry. Although compact, EchoStar’s set-top boxes incorporate a bewildering array of technologies, so Moder must be well-versed in electrical engineering disciplines as diverse as software, streaming video, and RF. To deter pirates looking for free TV, the set-top boxes are designed to be hacker-proof, but security built into the boxes also limits visibility into them during the manufacturing test process, a challenge that Moder has to work around. In addition, she has to evaluate appropriate levels of automation, working to take human subjectivity out of production-line test while ensuring quality and maintaining throughput.
For successfully meeting these challenges and positioning her team for further accomplishments this year, Moder was nominated for the 2010 Test Engineer of the Year award and was voted as the winner by the readers of Test & Measurement World.
Company evolution
Moder said EchoStar was a considerably different company when she joined it in February 2002. “I was probably the fourth test engineer who was hired. We were doing basic single-tuner satellite set-top boxes that were standard-definition only.” Engineering manager Alexander Matteo said that at that time, the company’s set-top-box manufacturing was performed at a single facility in Huntsville, AL, with some circuit boards fabricated in Guadalajara, Mexico.
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The company’s technology and manufacturing capabilities evolved rapidly. Soon, Moder said, EchoStar was adding hard drives to its products, turning them into what were then called PVRs (personal video recorders) and are now called DVRs (digital video recorders). In addition, the set-top boxes soon included secondary tuners, high-definition reception, and the ability to receive off-air broadcasts.
As the products evolved, so, too, did EchoStar’s manufacturing approach and the responsibilities of Moder’s group. Now, said Rojai Elsell, director of operations for global manufacturing, “Basically, all our manufacturing operations are subcontracted to large tier 1 contract manufacturers around the world.”
Moder said that her group of engineers within the global manufacturing operation were initially responsible for ensuring that the test processes the CMs (contract manufacturers) developed yielded products that met EchoStar’s design engineers’ specs. Now, Elsell explained, the operations group takes a product from development into factory implementation, essentially providing project management all the way through to actual production as well as delivery. EchoStar’s manufacturing operation, Elsell said, “stays in touch with a product through its entire manufacturing cycle, from inception to end of life.”
EchoStar engineers still don’t get involved in all of the details of fixture development and ICT (in-circuit-test) programming. That’s left to the CMs, who work with the Gerber files that EchoStar engineers provide. One of Moder’s goals is to ensure adequate test coverage. She said, “We make sure that the test coverage is there so [the CMs] could do ICT. We work with the layout group and the design engineering group to provide adequate test coverage and test points so that ICT can be performed in the factory environment, should we choose to go that route, and typically we do.”
She elaborated, “We interface with the design teams on a daily basis—both the software and the hardware design teams. The hardware design engineers need our input so they know where to put test coverage, and they need to know about component placement. They also define the specifications, so we take their performance specs and produce a production spec that we hand off to the factory. We work with the design guys on what the specs need to be and what the board needs to look like, and we work with the factory on what the factory process needs to look like. And we work with the factories on fixturing. The factory engineers are ultimately the designers of the board-level fixturing, but we help them debug their designs.”
Testing secure products
Although many companies rely on boundary scan to augment test coverage, that technique has not been viable for EchoStar. Said Moder, “Part of the problem we run into with boundary scan is that our chips are locked down. JTAG isn’t generally available because of the security requirements imposed by the nature of the business we are in. Our products need to be secure. If the software we run on our set-top boxes were to be hacked, people would have free television, and if people have free television, we don’t make any money.”
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She noted, however, that EchoStar is beginning to use some boundary-scan functions. She said, “The processor manufacturers have given us what we call limited boundary-scan capability. It’s not full boundary scan and it doesn’t provide potential hackers access through the JTAG port, but it does give us a little bit of access. We are working with our CMs to implement limited boundary scan to gain increased coverage.”
Moder added, “There are software hackers everywhere. If they are allowed access into the box, they can change the software such that the satellite signal coming down is decrypted and they have free content.” She explained that this is a problem faced by any company that delivers pay TV, including cable companies and satellite companies. “All the people in the industry are dealing with this piracy issue,” she said, “and as a result, we all have to get smart about locking down our software. So, everything is encrypted today, which makes it difficult in a manufacturing environment. We cannot do full-on boundary scan for that reason. We are happy that we have limited boundary scan—that was a huge win for us.”
Another approach Moder is working on is Bead Probe technology (Ref. 1), developed by Agilent Technologies. The Bead Probe technology places solder beads that can be contacted by a test probe directly onto PCB signal traces, making it possible to avoid the rerouting of signal paths to accommodate traditional test pads.
“The approach is particularly useful for providing test coverage on densely packed high-speed bus lines that we can’t attach a test point to,” said Matteo. “The market really likes smaller boxes, but these computers are so complex with so much functionality, and every time we add a test pad we take up physical real estate on the board. As Lisa leads us into using Bead Probe, we can get a lot more test coverage without increasing the size of the box.”
Testing without a satellite
Since the primary purpose of a set-top box is to receive satellite, cable, or off-air signals, a suitable signal must be available for production test. In a manufacturing environment, though, obtaining a real-world satellite signal can be impossible, because EchoStar’s set-top boxes are manufactured in worldwide factories that aren’t within the footprint of an EchoStar satellite. And even if the factories were within range of an appropriate satellite, it wouldn’t be possible to dial-up rain or other sources of potential signal interference to test the resiliency of the boxes.
Explained Moder, “One of my jobs is that I am responsible for signal distribution within the factory environment. I have to fool the set-top boxes into thinking they’re connected to the satellite.” To that end, she has developed satellite simulators—racks of equipment that generate streaming audio and video, RF-modulate it, and upconvert it. In addition, the simulators include interference test sets. “If you’ve got cloud cover or it’s raining or it’s snowing—that’s going to cause a noise that occurs on the signal, and we need to know that our set-top box can handle a certain level of that,” said Moder. Of course, it’s sometimes helpful for engineers to make sure that the simulators deliver good representations of actual signals, and for that, she said, “I’ve got dishes on the roof.”
Removing human subjectivity
The ultimate measure of the quality of a set-top box is the quality of the picture it delivers. That’s now judged by a human operator, but the company is moving toward an automated evaluation system.
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Said Matteo, “You have a human operator making an executive decision on the quality of your product,” and that operator’s judgment could be affected by fatigue or the pressure to meet quotas. Moder added, “In order for us to be able to evaluate video, we want to be able to take the subjectivity out of testing and have it automated to the point where you don’t have an operator sitting there watching and listening to exactly the same stuff over and over. Because we are all human, we make mistakes. We miss things—we don’t mean to, but that’s what happens.”
Matteo explained that “Lisa is driving the team to automate stream analysis because we would like to take the human eyeball out of the equation.” Nevertheless, he said, there is some hesitancy to take humans out of the process because they represent a comfort zone. The team needs to be convinced, he said, “that a computer can detect shadows, jitter, macroblocking, ghosting, or other stream anomalies that would cause a user to say, 'No, that doesn’t look right. I don’t want this service anymore.’” Added Moder, “And we don’t want that. We want you to like our service. We want you to like our products.”
Moder’s efforts to replace the human eyeball center on VI Technology’s MMTS Moving Video Test System, the winner of Test & Measurement World’s Best in Test award in the “Audio/video and multimedia” category (see "T&MW announces 2010 award winners"). Said Moder, “The MMTS box is probably the best commercially available device for measuring motion video.” To make use of the box, Moder implemented a frame-numbering scheme that allows frame-by-frame comparisons with a golden video. She said, “We are really excited about implementing this into our full-on automated test system from a unit-level test perspective.”
Adding the MMTS won’t completely remove the operator, however. “There are some things that do not lend themselves to automation because they are too costly,” Moder explained. “Take button-pushing. Yes, you can automate that with pneumatics, but the way we have our rack set up, that’s a very costly endeavor. And we’ve chosen not to go down that path just yet.”
Diverse background
Moder brings a diverse background to her responsibilities at EchoStar. She studied computer science in college and then found herself at a small medical electronics company designing high-power RF amplifiers for magnetic resonance imaging machines. When she came to EchoStar in 2002, her first assignment was to develop the satellite simulator. Then, she said, “We had a whole bunch of set-top boxes that got released in a single year, and as a result we all jumped on board, and we learned what we needed to learn to implement these new technologies.”
The ability to learn quickly should serve Moder and her team well as they bring new products online and pursue further automation and test throughput. One challenge was contending with one device whose test requires three 83-s reboots (to test power cycling, reset, and operating-system-upgrade functions). The implementation of automation and parallel test capabilities ensures that the operator keeps busy during the reboot cycles. Next up is full implementation of the MMTS on EchoStar’s set-top-box line-up, which Moder hopes to extend to the Slingbox line as well.
Noted Matteo, commenting on Moder and her colleagues, “This is a very stable team, thankfully. We’ve seen a lot of new product introductions, and we can really beat up a design and make sure it’s ready for mass production.” Concluded Moder, “When you get an issue with a brand new technology, you won’t know off the bat whether you have a hardware or software problem. But we can work with every facet of this company to get these issues resolved quickly.”
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