PXI systems aid manufacturing test

Fadi Daou Former CTO of PXIT; Consultant to Agilent Technologies Courtesy of Agilent Technologies

Neal O’Gorman, Agilent’s PXIT product manager, cleared up this apparent contradiction by explaining that the company remains committed to its current PXI customers and that going forward, it plans to work with customers to find the best solution for a given application, regardless of the technology platform.

Until LXI truly takes off, though, Agilent and its customers need to rely on other modular technologies when building comprehensive manufacturing-test systems. Fadi Daou, former CTO of PXIT and now consultant to Agilent on product strategy, spoke with me by phone to explain PXI’s role in manufacturing test.

Q: What kinds of products did the acquisition of PXIT bring to Agilent?

A: Our focus was on high-value instruments, mostly for electro-optical transceiver signal testing. Products included a 8.5-Gbps digital communications analyzer, bit-error-rate testers (BERTs), and derivative products such as pulse generators. We addressed the manufacturing test area where no one else had the right solution for the market.

Q: What does the right solution for manufacturing test involve?

A: There are three key needs in manufacturing test: throughput, cost, and size. PXI addresses all of these well. In throughput, for instance, you might need a minute to run a test using an R&D-type bench instrument. With a manufacturing-test instrument, you would want to run that test in 5 s.

Q: How does PXI help engineers shorten test time?

A: R&D test equipment lets the engineer make adjustments so he can measure signals to establish design margins and the like. In manufacturing test, you need to make only a limited set of measurements and only need a pass/fail response or simple metrics. That goes a lot faster.

With PXI, instrument setup is handled by software with no front-panel knobs to turn, allowing the system to move from one test to the next quickly. That also helps prevent people from making changes that might upset the test.

Q: Any other benefits?

A: PXI supports virtual instrumentation and allows you to get many instruments in the same chassis. This helps reduce size and cost of the instrument, which is critical for manufacturing test where users may need to establish and run many manufacturing lines in parallel in one location. With PXI, Agilent can sell an instrument for typically half of what an R&D instrument would cost.

A final important factor is that users can get PXI products that come from a single design team so they can ensure compatibility and offer optimized communications between the units. Even if from one company such as Agilent, R&D instruments of differing types come from different design groups addressing different needs. PXI permits one design team to create all the key instruments for an application.