News Briefs

In late April, National Instruments announced that it had acquired the operating assets of Measurement Computing Corp. Founded in 1989, Measurement Computing manufactures data-acquisition products for ISA, PCI, and USB (pictured) interfaces. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

"The acquisition of Measurement Computing is another step in NI's long history of providing very high value-added alternatives to traditional instrumentation," said Dr. James Truchard, National Instruments CEO and co-founder. He added, "This acquisition will strengthen both our hardware and software positions and further our goal of bringing our virtual instrumentation vision to millions of engineering applications worldwide."

The Measurement Computing business, as a wholly owned NI subsidiary, is expected to continue to run its operation as is out of Middleboro, MA. Measurement Computing will sell and support its products through its existing channels. www.ni.com.

Through an initiative called "Roadmapping America's Measurement Needs for a Strong Innovation Infrastructure," the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) plans to identify priority measurement infrastructure needs across industry and the economy and recommend steps to address them. A final report is expected to be published in early 2007.

NIST is launching the effort because it sees measurement capabilities as necessary for innovation and US industrial competitiveness. During testimony before the House Subcommittee on Environment, Technology, and Standards, NIST Acting Director Hratch Semerjian said, "The goal of this very important initiative, which will be undertaken in close cooperation with the private sector and other agencies, is to ensure that the nation's highest-priority measurement needs are identified and met. We need to be certain that the US measurement system is robust so that it can sustain America's economy and citizens at world-class levels in the 21st century."

NIST is planning several workshops at which representatives of industry, government, and academia will document measurement needs. Possible topics include manufacturing and reliability of nanotechnology systems, measurements for broadband communications, and data-storage technologies. NIST is inviting businesses, trade associations, professional groups, and other organizations to describe pressing measurement infrastructure needs and gaps in their particular areas.

In early 2006, the organization will convene a US Measurement Summit that will provide a venue for key customers and stakeholders to discuss priority measurement system needs and ways for addressing them. usms.nist.gov

Vision-system-manufacturer Cognex recently announced that it has acquired privately held DVT. Under the terms of the acquisition, Cognex purchased all of the outstanding shares of DVT for approximately $115 million. The acquisition was completed on May 9.

Cognex plans to maintain operations at DVT's facility in Duluth, GA, and to continue selling and supporting DVT vision products through DVT's third-party distribution channel.

"This is the largest acquisition that Cognex has ever completed . . .in terms of price, in terms of revenue, and most importantly, in terms of the positive impact that it will likely have on our company," said Dr. Robert J. Shillman, Cognex chairman and CEO.

Dr. Shillman added, "During 2004, Cognex started to build a third-party distribution channel, and prior to this acquisition we had signed over 40 distributors, mostly in North America. With the acquisition of DVT, Cognex immediately gains a worldwide network of more than 150 additional industrial distributors, all fully trained in selling and supporting machine-vision products."

As a result of the acquisition, Cognex expects an increase in its revenue of approximately $15 to $20 million during fiscal year 2005, but the acquisition is expected to be neutral to earnings in 2005. www.cognex.com.

Keithley Instruments has announced the S510, a high-channel-count, turnkey semiconductor reliability test system for use in lifetime modeling of advanced ULSI CMOS processes at the 65-nm node. With its high-throughput rate, the system reduces the time required to assess wafer reliability and perform lifetime modeling.

A fully automated, multichannel parallel reliability tester, the S510 system features scalable channel counts from 20 to 72 channels, an independent stress/measure channel for each structure, and simultaneous measurement across all channels. It can test multiple devices simultaneously on a wafer in conjunction with a semi-automatic or fully automatic probe station.

The capabilities of the S510, which employs a source-measure-unit (SMU) per-device architecture, are built on Keithley's KTE automation test executive software. The interactive component, KTEI, supports real-time graphing, interactive test modules, and lab-grade automation for use with analytical probers or semiautomatic probers. The S510 system software includes a parallel test module that performs tests for negative bias temperature instability (NBTI), time-dependent dielectric breakdown (TDDB), and channel-hot-carrier (CHC), and it is optimized to address the challenges of controlling up to 72 pins in parallel.

Base price: $240,000. Keithley Instruments, www.keithley.com.

Serial data streams continue to increase in speed, and measurements have to stay one step ahead of them. LeCroy's SDA 11000 claims an 11-GHz bandwidth on two channels, wide enough to measure 5-Gbps PCI Express, 6-Gbps Serial ATA III, and 4.25-Gbps Fibre Channel signals. When running on four channels, the instrument's bandwidth is 6 GHz.

When running on one or two channels, the SDA 11000 samples at 40 Gsamples/s with 16 Msamples of memory. It runs at 20 Gsamples/s (8 Msamples of memory) on three or four channels. The company also offers options for 32/16 Msamples and 100/50 Msamples of memory. Two front-panel USB ports lets you download data into a flash drive for security.

Like its predecessors, the SDA 11000 comes with a suite of measurement and analysis tools for jitter and eye diagrams. It measures eye patterns based on a stream of 12 million consecutive unit intervals. It shows mask violations and extrapolates a jitter-bathtub curve based on time-interval analysis. It also measures edge-to-edge jitter and extracts total jitter based on histogram measurements. Base price: $105,000. LeCroy, www.lecroy.com.

Semicon West, July 11–15, San Francisco, CA. Sponsored by SEMI. www.semicon.org.

EMC Symposium, August 8–12, Chicago, IL. Sponsored by IEEE, EMC Society. www.emc2005.org.

EOS/ESD Symposium, September 8–16, Anaheim, CA. Sponsored by ESD Association. www.esda.org.

Autotestcon, September 26–29, Orlando, FL. Sponsored by IEEE. www.autotestcon.com.

To learn about other conferences, courses, and calls for papers, visit www.tmworld.com/events.