2006 Best in Test Awards—Honorable Mentions

Driven by a supercharged optomechanical engine, the Fetura zoom module covers a 12.5:1 zoom range in 500 ms flat—10 times faster than conventional cam-driven zoom lenses. An onboard microprocessor and patented lens encoders significantly improve repeatability through closed-loop feedback, eliminating optical backlash and magnification approximations. The self-contained design of Fetura also reduces external wires to just one, while RS-232, FireWire 1394A, and USB connectivity options further streamline OEM integration. Engineered to withstand the forces of accelerated automation and positioning, Fetura performs reliably to 1 million zoom cycles. Base price: $4000.

With the 4500B peak power analyzer, you can capture, display, and analyze RF power in both time and statistical domains. The analyzer's 8.4-in. color TFT LCD lets you view up to two live RF channels, two live trigger channels, two stored memory channels, and one live math channel simultaneously. It also offers 100-ps timebase resolution and more than 60-dB dynamic range to improve TDMA, GSM, and RF amplifier linearity testing. Base price: $17,825.

Plugged into a computer's PCI-X slot, the XRI-1200 digital image-processing board meets the requirements of demanding x-ray imaging applications where images often contain motion artifacts and exhibit low-contrast, high-noise characteristics. The FPGA-based board performs image capture, shading correction, gamma correction, lens correction, motion detection, noise reduction, edge enhancement, and rotation with an arbitrary angle on a 1024x1024-pixel, 12-bit image at frame rates in excess of 30 frames/s. It is bundled with a dedicated software development kit and a suite of calibration and configuration tools that accommodate a variety of standard and custom data formats, including LVDS and Camera Link. Price: $3500 in OEM quantities.

Increasing throughput and lowering costs, MultiWriter programs up to 24 serial in-system-programmable (ISP) devices simultaneously per board or multi-board panel at high speed. This in-circuit-test-based system handles virtually any serial bus protocol without the addition of new tester hardware and achieves programming speeds equivalent to those cited in the part's data sheet. MultiWriter is available as part of a CheckSum-developed application package that includes a bed-of-nails test fixture and associated test program operating on a CheckSum Analyst in-circuit test system. Price: less than $20,000 for an average fixture and program with 2000 points and MultiWriter ISP functionality.

Part of Mentor's design-for-test product portfolio, the YieldAssist diagnostic tool allows semiconductor manufacturers to harvest device failure information from the wafer-sort phase of manufacturing test. By identifying both systematic and random defects, YieldAssist speeds root-cause failure analysis and improves device yield. YieldAssist also provides a critical link back into the design process for improving design for manufacturability as well as for adaptively improving the quality of the manufacturing test itself and reducing defect per million (DPM) rates. Base price: $126,000 per year for a term-based license.

Lightweight and portable, the VNA Master MS2024A and MS2026A handheld vector network analyzers perform vector-corrected one-port and one-path/two-port measurements over a frequency range of 2 MHz to 6 GHz. The analyzers' RF immunity rejection of up to +17 dBm ensures high-accuracy measurements when used to deploy, verify, and troubleshoot military/defense and commercial wireless networks. High and low power settings for two-port measurements eliminate the need for external attenuators. Base price: $15,645.

The Versatest V5500 enables single-insertion testing of multichip package (MCP) devices containing multiple memory types (flash, DRAM, and SRAM), as well as discrete flash memory. What's more, the V5500 offers an optional programmable interface matrix that provides 16,384 pins per test head. Using the matrix, you can obtain up to four times the parallelism at final test—for up to 320 NAND flash devices in parallel or up to 256 NOR flash and MCP devices in parallel. Base price: $1.3 million for a system capable of testing 256 devices in parallel.

As a member of the FLEX test platform, the UltraFLEX system offers the digital speed and pin count needed for multisite testing of complex, high-performance devices used in computing, graphics, audio/visual, and networking. The system provides background DSP processing to reduce overall test time. It can be configured with digital, AC, and DC test resources, and it provides full synchronization and control of each test instrument on a vector-by-vector basis. The FLEX platform employs a universal-slot test head and high-density instrument design so you can match system configurations to changing production requirements right on the test floor. Base price: less than $1 million.

Intended for compliance testing of communication designs, the BERTScope CRU 12500A clock-recovery instrument measures and displays the PLL frequency response from 20 kHz to 12 MHz, which is, according to the manufacturer, the widest loop bandwidth available for jitter testing on the market today. The CRU 12500A also allows full control of key parameters, including loop bandwidth, peaking/damping, and roll off. You can recover full rate clocks—including spread-spectrum clocks used in Serial ATA (SATA), Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), PCI Express, and Fully Buffered DIMM (FB-DIMM) applications—for signals at data rates from 150 Mbps to 12.5 Gbps. Base price: $29,000.

The GC22x0 series of universal time-interval counters consists of three 3U PCI boards capable of measuring frequencies up to 2 GHz. In addition to adjustable input trigger levels, these boards provide A and B channels for ratiometric measurements, as well as interval, period, and frequency measurements. The GC22x0 series achieves a frequency resolution of 10 digits in just 1 s and resolves time measurements to 100 ps. Prices: $1850 to $3850.

The N4903A high-performance serial bit-error-rate tester (BERT), which offers complete calibrated jitter tolerance testing (J-BERT) in a single instrument, can perform BER tests on popular serial buses such as PCI Express, SerialATA, Fibre Channel, and Gigabit Ethernet. The N4903A also performs eye contour and mask testing, spectral jitter decomposition, and error-location capture, and it features 20-ps transition times and 50-mV analyzer sensitivity. With all jitter sources calibrated in one box, the unit shortens development time, so even engineers without jitter expertise can have the unit running within minutes. Base prices: 7-Gbps version—$120,000; 12.5-Gbps version—$160,000.

This single-channel arbitrary waveform generator packs 1.2-Gsamples/s sample clock performance, large waveform memory (8 Mbytes standard, 16 Mbytes optional), and a powerful sequence generator into a small, half-rack case that is just 2U high. The Wonder Wave Model 1281 lets you create very large, complex waveforms up to 400 MHz with 12 bits of resolution for less than $15,000. It also provides square wave transition times of less than 700 ps. Calibration and updates are computer controlled through the GPIB, LAN, or USB 2.0 port. Base price: $14,175.

What LeCroy calls a "near-real-time oscilloscope," WaveExpert combines the high bandwidth and accuracy of a sampling oscilloscope with the speed and flexibility of a real-time instrument. The WaveExpert series offers up to 100-GHz bandwidth, as well as signal acquisition speeds that are 100 times faster (10 Msamples/s) and memory depths 125,000 times deeper (512 Mpoints) than conventional sampling scopes. A coherent interleaved sampling mode enables the capture and display of long serial data waveforms without the need for an external pattern trigger. WaveExpert also produces time-domain reflectometry (TDR) pulses that have 20-ps incident rise times. Base price: $21,500.

Comprising three tools that are employed at different stages in product development, the DFT Analyzer validates the boundary-scan (IEEE 1149.1/JTAG) design-for-test features of a circuit-board design before prototypes are assembled. It determines the extent of a design's boundary-scan test coverage and recommends changes that would increase coverage. The final output of DFT Analyzer is a complete boundary-scan description of the design that can be imported directly into the boundary-scan test-generation tool in ScanWorks, the company's JTAG system. Base price: $10,000 for limited-term licensing.

Able to test logic and memory devices up to 150 W, the HPB-5B burn-in system leverages individual pattern zones per burn-in board with individual temperature control for each device. The system provides precise, individual temperature control for as many as 48 devices per burn-in board, which allows device types to be mixed within the oven during the burn-in cycle. Furthermore, you can run up to 16 different types of devices with different power levels and temperature settings at the same time. The HPB-5B tests devices at a maximum temperature of 150°C and has a capacity for up to 768 devices.

Arendar 2006 software offers a scalable solution to collecting, organizing, and extracting valuable information from your design, validation, and manufacturing test data through a standard Web browser. Drag-and-drop multidimensional test-performance analysis leverages online analytical processing (OLAP), data cube, and business intelligence technologies to allow you to view product test information from an unlimited number of perspectives, such as by date, by test station, by product, by product line, by operator, and by test revision. Arendar uses Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle databases to safely store and retrieve data without requiring a database administrator or IT expert. Price: Arendar Desktop—$3995; Arendar Enterprise Server—from $9995.

Based on a high-throughput source measure unit (SMU) in a modular instrument form factor, the Series 2600 System SourceMeter platform provides multichannel scalability for cost-effective testing of electronic components and semiconductor devices. The single-channel Model 2601 and dual-channel Model 2602 can be used as stand-alone SMUs or seamlessly integrated into systems of virtually any channel count through TSP-Link, Keithley's 100-Mbps serial bus for communication and trigger coordination. An embedded test script processor lets you program a sequence of test commands and execute high-speed automated test sequences independently of a PC operating system. Base price: Model 2601—$5495; Model 2602—$7995.

Combining an arbitrary waveform generator, function generator, and pulse generator into a single compact instrument, the AFG3000 Series focuses on usability, simplicity, and performance at an affordable price. The six-model series offers frequencies up to 240 MHz and sampling rates up to 2 Gsamples/s. Dual-channel models allow independent selection of waveforms and frequencies. A 5.6-in. display shows all relevant waveform parameters and graphical waveform shape at a single glance. Shortcut keys provide direct access to frequently used functions and parameters, while a USB connector on the front panel enables waveform storage to a memory device. Prices: $1780 to $8500.