News Briefs

Verigy has introduced instrumentation suites that can be accommodated within a V93000 compact test head to address three key application areas: consumer mixed-signal, RF, and nanoelectronics.

The Consumer Mixed Signal system includes an MB AV8 multiband audio-video card that addresses professional audio, baseband IQ, and video devices. The system also includes a Pin Scale 400 card, which provides 100- to 400-Mbps data rates per pin at 224 Mvectors per pin. Also included are DC Scale VI32 and DC Scale DPS32 cards to provide precision voltages and support multiple power domains. Base price: $600,000 for a 384-pin system.

Verigy’s Port Scale RF system provides the RF measurement capability required to test emerging high-integration devices containing integrated RF, mixed-signal, digital, and power-management devices as well as embedded or stacked memory. It includes a 6-GHz RF source card, an RF front-end card that provides 12 RF ports, an RF interface, an MB AV8 card, and a 48-port RF calibration kit that can support up to 10 RF systems. Base price: $320,000.

The company also introduced its V93000 Nanoelectronics Digital system for structural and functional test for wafer sort and final test of digital ICs fabricated in 65-nm and smaller geometries. The system includes a Pin Scale 400 digital pin card that scales from DC to 533 Mbps as well as a DC Scale DPS 32 card for supporting multiple sites and multiple power domains. Base price: $499,000. www.verigy.com.

Spirent TestCenter 2.0, a system for testing voice, data, and video networks, increases productivity over version 1.0 by employing new software that helps users cut test-development time. TestCenter consists of a chassis with network-interface cards that generate and analyze traffic for access networks, core networks, switches, routers, and DSLAMS at protocol layers 2 through 7. You can use TestCenter for performance and conformance testing on network equipment in production or on service-provider networks.

The Inspire Architecture software lets you set up tests with a GUI and convert them to Tcl scripts. You can also convert prewritten scripts to GUIs for easy debug. A feature called HyperFilters lets you select data streams based on addresses, protocol tags, and protocol IDs and analyze them for errors.

TestCenter provides test scripts for protocols such as Ethernet at layer 2 and voice and video quality at layer 7. It also includes scripts for intermediate layers such as Internet Protocol (IP) and Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS).

Base price: $30,000. Spirent Communications, www.spirent.com/go/STC_2.

The WiMAX Forum announced the first North America-based certification test lab on June 19 during the WiMAX Forum Member Conference in Madrid. Operated by AT4 wireless, the lab will be located in Virginia and will become one of five test labs for WiMAX Forum Certified products worldwide.

The lab will conduct WiMAX Forum certification testing and radiated performance testing (RPT), and AT4 wireless will develop certification test beds to match other test beds globally. WiMAX Forum members in the Americas may submit devices for certification at the Virginia facility beginning in October. www.at4wireless.com; www.wimaxforum.org.

At the SEMI Test Summit & Reception at Semicon West in San Francisco, executives from five semiconductor ATE companies will join moderator Rick Nelson, chief editor of Test and Measurement World, and host Ashoke Seth, test operations director at Intel, in a discussion focused on meeting the design, test, and yield requirements for advanced semiconductor manufacturing. Panelists will include R. Keith Lee, president and CEO, Advantest America; Lavi Lev, CEO and president, Credence Systems; Tim Moriarty, president, Nextest Systems; Mark Jagiela, president, Teradyne Semiconductor Test Division; and Keith L. Barnes, president and CEO, Verigy.

The summit will take place July 18, at 5:30 p.m. in the Moscone Center. www.semiconwest.org.

Landrex Technologies has announced the sale of its Optima II 7301 Express AOI system to Intelligent Manufacturing Solutions (IMS). Jeff Buxton, technical operations manager at IMS, cited the system’s quick setup time as a key feature that would benefit IMS’s high-mix environment. www.landrex-us.com, www.imscorp-us.com.

Each year, Test & Measurement World names an outstanding engineer as the Test Engineer of the Year, and we are now accepting nominations for the 2008 award. From the nominations we receive, our editors will select six finalists, whom we will profile in our October issue. Readers will then have a chance to vote for the Test Engineer of the Year, and we’ll announce the winner in early 2008.

The recipient of the award will designate an educational institution to receive a grant courtesy of award sponsors National Instruments and Keithley Instruments. The nomination deadline is August 1. www.tmworld.com/awards.

Mathematica 6 lets you import data from remote URLs without requiring you to download and save data files. It accepts data in Excel, OpenOffice, text, binary, and medical-file formats, and also lets you import audio and image files. You can then perform calculations on the data using more than 300 math functions.

You can use the bidirectional-calling feature to call code to and from many programming languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, Python, Visual Basic, and LabView. These languages appear as objects, so you can manipulate data using prewritten code, or applications can use Mathematica for calculations.

With the software’s interactive data-visualization tool, you can enter an argument and data parameters with specified ranges and then use sliders to change the data and see how changes affect the plot. The figure shows the syntax for a sine wave with adjustable amplitude and frequency.

The improved FindFit function lets you define a range of data that the function should use to create a curve-fitting equation. You can also edit and plot graphics in real time, as the software applies a stream of data to your equations. Mathematica 6 runs on Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Solaris, and HP-UX.

Base price: $2495. Wolfram Research, www.wolfram.com.

Autotestcon, September 17–20, Anaheim, CA. Sponsored by IEEE. www.autotestcon.com.

International Test Conference (ITC), October 23–25, Santa Clara, CA. Sponsored by IEEE. www.itctestweek.org.

Vision, November 6–8, Stuttgart, Germany. Produced by Messe Stuttgart. www.vision-messe.de.

Productronica, November 13–16, Munich, Germany. Produced by Messe Munchen. www.global-electronics.net/link/de/16407965.

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