Home-brew testers save $200k
Martin Rowe, Senior Technical Editor -- Test & Measurement World, 11/1/2003
Large companies tend to buy off-the-shelf test equipment because doing so can reduce time-to-market. Small companies buck that trend and build their own because the cash to buy test equipment just isn't there. Three small companies—Centellax (www.centallax.com), Inphi (www.inphi-corp.com), and Network Elements (www.nei.com)—built their own pseudorandom bit sequence (PRBS) testers rather than buy them. The result: Each company saved over $200,000.
Centellax CEO Julio Perdomo told me that his engineers built a PRBS source for characterizing the company's 40-Gbits/s amplifiers, drivers, multiplexers, and modulators. "We needed to demonstrate that our products produced less than 1 ps of jitter and we didn't want to purchase a commercial pattern generator," said Perdomo. To generate the 40-Gbits/s data rate, Centellax engineers designed an IC with four 10-Gbits/s sources and used the company's own multiplexers to multiply the data rate. Perdomo says that development time took three-to-four months, including building of a power supply and reference clock.
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A home-brew PRBS generator and BERT tests 10-Gbits/s optical transducers. Courtesy of Network Elements. |
Inphi's engineers paralleled their counterparts at Centellax—they designed a 10-Gbits/s PRBS source and used their multiplexer product to increase speeds to 40 Gbits/s. Raghavan says that Inphi needed about four weeks of IC development time plus about two weeks to assemble and debug the tester.
When Network Elements started making 10-Gbits/s optical components in 2000, the equipment that test-engineering manager Fred Barbee needed didn't exist. "We had the expertise to build our own test equipment and we didn't have to wait for the test equipment makers to catch up," Barbee explained. The company used its own programmable data source IC to create PRBS test patterns for its early 10-Gbits/s optical transducers.
Like Inphi, Network Elements uses a commercial BERT for characterizing new devices but saved money by building its own tester for production of its optical networking modules. "We can generate test patterns and count errors with our in-house tester so we don't need to buy one," says Barbee. (To learn more about how Network Elements uses its tester, see "Optics get temperature calibration," T&MW, August 2003, p. 21, www.tmworld.com/archives).
Martin Rowe, Senior Technical Editor, m.rowe@tmworld.com
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Tektronix TDS1000, TDS2000, and TDS300B oscilloscopes now have software that lets you move captured waveforms and data directly into Microsoft Word or Excel. Open Choice software adds toolbars that let you import scope data and screen images directly into documents and spreadsheets. You can also save data and screen images for import into other data-analysis programs. Drivers for automating measurements are also included. 
