News briefs

Agilent Technologies has entered the DRAM final-test market with the 93000 High-Speed Memory (HSM) Series, which targets devices used in memory-hungry computers and consumer-electronics products. With the HSM, Agilent is offering a DRAM-test complement to its Versatest V5500 single-insertion flash-memory final-test system, introduced in July 2005.

Debbora Ahlgren, an Agilent Automated Test Group VP & GM, said she believes the time is opportune for adapting the 93000 architecture for DRAM test. "I believe we are at a juncture in memory test not unlike the juncture that we saw when Agilent introduced the first tester-per-pin architecture," she said. The original 93000 targeted single-insertion test of SOCs. In the memory space, Ahlgren said, the 93000 HSM enables similar single-insertion approaches to testing high-speed memory cores as well as I/O.

The 93000 HSM is available as part of an Agilent-engineered, integrated test cell; it supports 16-site test for XDR (extreme data rate) or 32-site test for GDDR (graphics double data rate) DRAMs in a single test head. It also supports at-speed capture of failure data on all sites in parallel and includes an at-speed, per-pin algorithmic pattern generator. It comes with the vendor's new memory-test language (MTL), based on C++. The 93000 HSM Series is available in 2.2-Gbps and 3.6-Gbps speed classes. www.agilent.com.

Zafer Boz (with plaque) accepted the Test Engineer of the Year award from Russ Pratt (T&MW’s publisher, left), Eric Starkloff (marketing director of National Instruments), and Rick Nelson (T&MW’s chief editor).

Publisher Russ Pratt began the presentations by announcing the winner of the 2006 Test Engineer of the Year award: Zafer Boz of STMicroelectronics. Boz was nominated because of a C-language-based test executive he developed for evaluating wireless LAN chips.

Boz was one of six nominees chosen by our editors. We profiled the six in our September 2005 issue and invited our readers to vote for the Test Engineer of the Year. As part of his award, Boz has designated an engineering program to receive a $20,000 grant, courtesy of National Instruments, the award sponsor.

Upon receiving the award, Boz said that he was "very surprised and very pleased," and he added, "I feel very lucky to have been selected as one of the six finalists and be alongside five other very experienced and respected engineers." (Profile of Zafer Boz.)

Next up were the annual product awards. Chief editor Rick Nelson recognized the 12 products that won 2006 Best in Test awards. Our editors present these awards to recognize innovative products in the electronics test and measurement industry.

We announced this year's winners in our December 2005/January 2006 issue, and readers used an online ballot to vote for the one that would be named the Test Product of the Year. The winner is the PXI-5922 digitizer from National Instruments, a single-slot PXI card that can change its resolution with the sampling rate (see p. 23). Eric Starkloff, marketing director of NI, accepted the award plaque for his company.

John Newcomer (center) of Keithley accepted the Test of Time award from Russ Pratt and Rick Nelson.

T&MW inaugurated the Best in Test awards program in 1991. You can learn more about the awards and previous winners at www.tmworld.com/awards.

The Model 2910 vector signal generator employs a software-defined radio architecture to accomplish digitally what used to be done in analog, resulting in a low-cost instrument that provides speed and flexibility while maintaining signal quality. The instrument employs off-the-shelf FPGAs and DSPs to avoid the costs associated with custom ASICs.

The 2910 can generate nearly any type of signal in the 400-MHz-to-2.5-GHz range having a modulation bandwidth up to 40 MHz. The synthesizer design provides for frequency-tuning times of less than 3 ms, and the instrument's leveling approach uses all-electronic attenuation to provide better than 3-ms amplitude level settling. (Sweep and list modes provide frequency and level settling within 1.5 ms.)

Other features include a 64-Msample (256-Mbyte) arbitrary-waveform-generator memory to provide for rapid switching between waveforms. Amplitude level accuracy, linearity, and repeatability all spec out at w0.5 dB. GSM phase error of less than 0.3° and EDGE error vector magnitude (EVM) of better than 0.4% illustrate the instrument's modulation quality. A hierarchical interface approach puts functions most often used near the top of the hierarchy. Graphical and tabular signal views are available. The LXI Class C-compliant instrument includes built-in digital cellular signal-generation capability.

Base price: $14,500. Keithley Instruments, www.keithley.com.

Agilent Technologies' jitter-compliance software for its N4903A J-BERT lets the tester automatically perform jitter compliance tests on serial-bus receivers. The J-BERT can generate serial data streams with calibrated, controlled jitter and then detect errors from the receiver's output. It can also sweep through frequency and amplitude ranges of jitter and produce a jitter-performance curve.

You can compare your measurements against jitter-tolerance compliance curves for PCI Express, SerialATA II, Fibre Channel, Fully-Buffered DIMM (FB DIMM), Common Electrical I/O (CEI) 6/11, 10 Gigabit Attachment Unit Interface (XAUI), 10 Gigabit Serial Electrical Interface (XFI), and 10 Gigabit Small Form Factor Pluggable (XFP) serial buses. You can control periodic jitter, random jitter, bonded uncorrelated jitter, intersymbol interference, and sinusoidal interference. You can also create your own tolerance curves.

Agilent has also announced that N4903A customers can get additional free downloads of measurement utilities. The first is a quick eye and pattern-capture utility.

Price: N4903 compliance software for J-BERT—$9995. Base prices for the J-BERT: 7 Gbps—$120,000; 12 Gbps—$160,000. Agilent Technologies, www.agilent.com.

SAE, April 3–6, Detroit, MI. Sponsored by Society of Engineers. www.sae.org.

Vision Show East, May 9–11, Boston, MA. Sponsored by Automated Imaging Association. www.machinevisiononline.org.

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