Product Update

You can control 24 TTL-compatible I/O lines on a small USBI/O24 module that connects to a PC through a USB port. Each I/O line can sink up to 30 mA, and you can set a pin individually to act as either an input or an output. The module provides the I/O pins in three groups of eight pins each, and a male header lets you easily connect I/O lines to flat-cable connectors. The module comes with a Virtual Comm driver and a DLL that lets you control the I/O pins in programs written in C, Basic, and Delphi. Price: $69. Saelig, Fairport, NY. 716-425-3753; www.saelig.com.

New oscilloscope probes that measure 5 mm in diameter and 65 mm in length make it easier to probe small circuits that contain fine-pitch components. A spring-loaded point prevents the probe from slipping off a conductor during measurements. Accessories include a variety of probe tips, ground leads, and color-coded rings that help you identify probes and their connections to an instrument. These 500-MHz 10X passive voltage probes offer an input resistance of 10 MV and can operate in Cat II, 300-V and Cat I, 500-V equipment. Price: $230. Pomona Electronics, Pomona, CA. 909-623-3463; www.pomonaelectronics.com .

The cost of IC masks can easily reach $1M per set, so before someone requests a circuit change, IC fabs require assurance that the change will actually work. Traditionally, that meant the use of a focused ion-beam microscope (FIB) to inspect and "edit" defects. But the advent of multilayer metal interconnections and deeply buried submicron circuits, along with the use of copper connections, makes etching and bridging operations difficult.

The IDS OptiFIB overcomes problems by combining an optical microscope with a FIB and placing them on the same optical axis. The combination lets users quickly move to an area of interest by eye and then make repairs—from the backside of a thinned device, where the FIB has less difficulty isolating defects and making repairs. The thinned silicon provides no normal optical landmarks, but the OptiFIB's optical microscope can see through the thinned silicon and pick out device features. When used with CAD navigation tools, the optical microscope can help a user position the beam to operate on the proper circuit components. This location technique also works on the front side of a device that loses optical features due to chemical-mechanical polishing (CMP).

The combination of a coaxial optical microscope and a FIB improves throughput of devices undergoing inspection and repair, and it helps assure engineers that they have found the right place to make a change.

Price: $1.5M. Schlumberger Semiconductor Solutions, San Jose, CA. 408-586-8200; www.slb.com/semiconductors.

The Model 1105 USB/IEEE 488 hub/controller lets you mix USB and IEEE 488 instruments in the same test system. The unit, which connects to a PC through a USB port, adds an IEEE 488.2 port and a USB hub to your system. You can control up to 14 IEEE 488 instruments and six USB devices such as instruments, cameras, and printers.

You can use the unit on PCs running Windows 98 or later. The IEEE 488.2 drivers support most programming languages and include multiple commands sets, making the unit's software compatible with National Instruments' IEEE 488.1 "ib" command set, newer IEEE 488.2 commands, and the ICS Electronics 488-PC2 command set. The Model 1105's keyboard-controller software lets you type instrument commands from your keyboard, so you can test communication with your devices and instruments without writing any code.

Price: $695. ICS Electronics, Pleasanton, CA. 925-416-1000; www.icselect.com.

The T&M Programmers Toolkit from Agilent Technologies provides a suite of tools that extend the capabilities of Microsoft's Visual Studio .NET software. The Agilent software comes with APIs, class libraries, widgets, drivers, and a context-sensitive help system. Overall, the toolkit aims to simplify the creation, testing, and use of application programs. Instead of writing code at a low level, users can apply code-generation wizards—as well as add-in components from Agilent and other suppliers—to produce a complete instrument-control program. To aid in the development of instrument-control programs, an Instrument Explorer finds instruments attached to a computer. The Explorer software also lets programmers easily manage instrument setups and driver installations and configurations—often the most vexing part of developing a T&M application. Additional development tools add a series of data-analysis and data-graphing programs, an I/O monitor that assists during debugging instrument connections, and an Agilent VEE connection wizard that lets you link .NET programs with VEE software.

The company offers the T&M Programmers Toolkit in several licensing versions. The Connectivity Suite (W1138A) version includes interface hardware for IEEE 488 ports, LANs, and USB-based products.

Base price: $695. Agilent Technologies, Santa Clara, CA. 800-452-4844, ext. 7706; www.agilent.com.

Testing OC-768 (40 Gbits/s) optical communications products starts with bit-error-rate (BER) measurements. To achieve such high transmission rates, Anritsu has introduced the ME7760A BER test system, which can test data rates up to 43.5 Gbits/s. The system's rack of instruments includes a pattern generator, multiplexer, demultiplexer, and error detector.

The system's MP 1775A pattern generator lets you create four SONET/SDH channels. The instrument generates pseudorandom bit sequences with lengths from 2⁷–1 bits to 2³¹–1 bits. It also generates SONET/SHD frames so you can send the PRBS signals directly through a system under test, or you can package the patterns in frames.

To achieve 40-Gbits/s data rates, you use the MP1801A four-channel optical mutliplexer. On the receive side, the MP1802A demultiplexer separates the data streams, and the MP1776A measures BER on each channel.

Base price: $1 million. Anritsu, Richardson, TX. 800-267-4878; www.us.anritsu.com.

The automated fiber stripper in the KCT-2100 test system handles the task of connecting and disconnecting bare fibers from a device under test. Instead of requiring as long as 8 min for a connection operation, the KCT-2100 performs it in 15 s. The automated process includes the stripping and cutting of bare fibers.

The tester can quickly characterize optical multiplexers and demultiplexers, fiber Bragg gratings, thin-film filters, and other passive components. The basic instrument supplies a swept-wavelength tunable laser and four channels that will test devices simultaneously. You can add as many as 32 channels to a tester.

The manufacturer supplies software written in C++, but users need no programming experience. Instead, they use drag-and-drop icons that establish the order of testing, acquisition of data, and instrument control. The instrument's software runs under Windows NT.

Price: $95,000 (basic instrument); $115,000 (8-channel instrument); $150,000 (32-channel instrument). Katsina Optics, Milpitas, CA. 408-956-0500; www.katsinaoptics.com.

Credence Systems has introduced the ASL 3000RF mixed-signal, radio-frequency integrated-circuit (RFIC) test system for wideband, wireless communications devices, including those targeting 802.11 wireless local area networking (WLAN) standards and third-generation (3G) mobile communications services. The ASL 3000RF incorporates the company's modulated vector network analysis (MVNA) technology, which allows S-parameter measurements to be made with wideband, digitally modulated signals. This provides better accuracy for wireless applications, so engineers can reduce guardbands in production and achieve higher device yield. The system offers both RF and mixed-signal instrumentation, and its scaleable architecture enables users to upgrade their systems with analog, digital, and enhanced RF test capabilities.

The ASL 3000RF features four parallel RF receivers, each with a dedicated digital signal processor (DSP). The system accommodates up to eight RF ports at 6 GHz and up to 64 50-MHz digital pins.

Price: $400,000 (RF only) to less than $1 million (fully configured). Credence Systems, Fremont, CA, 510-657-7400; www.credence.com.

To enable designers of real-time embedded applications to resolve problems quickly, Texas Instruments has introduced new IEEE 1149.1-based emulation technology as part of its real-time eXpressDSP software and development tools. Compatible with previous TI emulators, the XDS560 emulator features a high-speed Real-Time Data Exchange (RTDX) that transfers data bidirectionally between the target processor and the host development platform at more than 2 Mbytes/s. It also offers code download speeds at up to half a megabyte per second. The XDS560 supports standard RTDX on all of TI's TMS320C5000, TMS320C6000, and ARM processors, and it also offers high-speed RTDX for enabled processors at data rates more than 100 times faster than available with standard RTDX.

The emulator helps developers overcome "vanishing visibility," or the increasingly difficult challenge of seeing into the real-time behavior of an executing application. RTDX data is available from TI's Code Composer Studio Integrated Development Environment (IDE) through a Microsoft COM interface to ensure compatibility with applications such as Microsoft Excel, the MathWorks MATLAB, and National Instruments' LabView. The XDS560 emulator features advanced event triggering, which allows complex sequences of events to be defined and evaluated non-intrusively in real-time, before halting the CPU or taking an alternate action.

The emulator includes a PCI card that plugs into the host computer plus a 1.5-m cable with a low-profile, credit-card sized cable pod that provides connection to the target system; auto-sensing voltage capabilities range from 5 V down to 0.5 V.

Price: $4995. Texas Instruments, Dallas, TX. 800-336-5236; www.dspvillage.ti.com/xds560pr1.