News briefs

-- Test & Measurement World, 7/1/2010 12:00:00 AM

IMEC touts machine-vision platform Atrenta announces SpyGlass-Physical Audio analyzer aims at production Signal-generator family reaches 70 GHz Calendar

IMEC touts machine-vision platform

IMEC—a European research center based in Belgium—has embarked on a machine-vision program called NVision that leverages IMEC's technologies and capabilities. Speaking at the IMEC Technology Forum (June 7–8, Leuven, Belgium), Johan De Geyter, department director for digital components at IMEC, said NVision will have applications in compact stereocams, one-chip smart cameras, high-speed cameras, and light-field imaging. Initial NVision applications, he said, will center on volumetric displays, tumor scanners, high-speed food scanners, and endoscopic smart pills.

De Geyter delved into the topic of HSI (hyperspectral imaging), and he presented as an example a melanoma pen, which IMEC is developing with a partner company. The handheld device employs controlled light, calibration, and sensing algorithms running on an embedded processor that performs hyperspectral analysis to provide go/no-go diagnosis of skin cancers. The pen will incorporate an IMEC HSI module.

De Geyter described HSI as a combination of spectroscopy and imaging that improves machine vision by making use of the spectral information of the material being analyzed. The technique, he said, can serve medical, chemical, food and feed, pharmaceutical, and automotive applications. He added that a commercial system based on the IMEC approach could cost less than $60,000 and operate at better than 8000 lines/s, in contrast to the $80,000 price tag and 180-lines/s capability of a traditional system. www.imec.be.

Atrenta announces SpyGlass-Physical

Atrenta at the Design Automation Conference (June 13–18, Anaheim, CA) announced the availability of its new SpyGlass-Physical product. This addition to the SpyGlass family enables engineers to achieve faster design closure by modeling physical implementation effects at the RTL (register transfer level) stage of the design.

Previous SpyGlass products provide information on whether a design is syntactically correct and testable; SpyGlass-Physical provides early estimates of area, power, timing, and routability for RTL designers who lack physical design expertise or tools. Existing SpyGlass users can integrate the new product into their design flow.

Ravi Varadarajan, Atrenta fellow, said the new tool does not replace a customer's favorite implementation tools but rather makes the existing tools more efficient, allowing designers to identify problems earlier in the design cycle. In addition, the time penalties involved in successive iterations using traditional tools (in which you find problems after place-and-route, for instance) limit the amount of exploration designers can do, with the result that they might settle for a suboptimum solution. SpyGlass-Physical, Varadarajan said, alleviates that problem. www.atrenta.com.

Audio analyzer aims at production

Production tests on MP3 players, DVD players, and other audio products require a few basic measurements that must be made quickly. The APx515 from Audio Precision can replace the many "home-brew" test setups in use today at a cost considerably lower than the company's other audio testers. It uses the technology from the company's eight-channel audio analyzers in a unit that has two analog inputs and two analog outputs. It also has 192-kbps digital audio I/O.

Using the included software or a master .NET or LabView application, the APx515 can test an audio device in 3 s, providing measurements such as power and noise. The included software is based on the software used with the APx585 and the APx525. Test operators can control the APx515 through a keyboard, foot pedal, or bar-code scanner.

The APx515 has three software options that add functions to the unit: One option adds high-speed multitone and continuous sweep measurements; the second adds intermodulation distortion, maximum output level, dynamic range, and fast Fourier transforms; and the third adds acoustic-response measurements.

Base price: $6200. Audio Precision, www.ap.com.

Signal-generator family reaches 70 GHz

Anritsu's MG3690C RF/microwave signal generators allow engineers to conduct tests on microwave subsystems, components, and systems in the lab; their fast 5-ms switching times also let the units maximize throughput in manufacturing applications.

The models in the MG3690C family generate signals from 0.1 Hz to 70 GHz. Individual instruments can produce baseband, IF, RF, and microwave signals to maximize equipment use and reduce cost of test. Options enable low phase-noise performance of –115 dB/Hz at 20 GHz at a 10-kHz offset.

The MG3690C instruments can generate narrow pulses down to 10 ns to emulate a variety of signals, and they can generate amplitude-leveled pulses down to 100 ns to minimize amplitude drift over time and temperature for tight test margins. The MG3690C series can generate doublet, triplet, and quadruplet pulses with independently set spacing and pulse width, enabling the signal generators to emulate a wide range of radar returns.

Models are available with top frequencies of 10, 20, 31.8, 40, 50, and 70 GHz. All models offer a 0.1-Hz start frequency option.

Base price: $17,800. Anritsu, www.us.anritsu.com.

Calendar

NIWeek, August 3-5, Austin, TX. National Instruments, www.niweek.com.

Autotestcon, September 13-16, Orlando, FL. IEEE, www.autotestcon.com.

EOS/ESD Symposium, October 3-8, Reno, NV. Electrostatic Discharge Association, www.esda.org.

International Test Conference, November 2-4, Austin, TX. IEEE, www.itctestweek.org.