Standards beneficial, but no panacea

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2007 would seem to have been a good year for standards, both formal and de facto. PXI turned 10 years old, and PXI-based instrument sales are growing at double-digit annual rates, according to Frost & Sullivan research. LXI-equipped instruments achieved $200 million in sales just two years after the standard's 2005 introduction. Although several industry observers have questioned the significance of that figure—wondering exactly how many of compliant instruments' LXI ports actually get used—it seems clear to me that LXI's cost and form-factor advantages and its ubiquity will accelerate its use. Even the venerable VXI is hanging on. Although Frost & Sullivan expects VXI revenues to tail off gradually, new VXI instruments, such as ZTEC Instruments' ZT4610 VXI digital oscilloscopes, were introduced in 2007. In addition, a new VXI-LXI developer's kit from VXI Technology enables hybrid test systems that make the best of both standards.

On the semiconductor test front, the Semiconductor Test Consortium has not been successful in getting big-iron ATE makers other than Advantest to build OpenStar-compliant test systems, but it has been successful in broadening the consortium's appeal—attracting the attention of companies like LTX—with the STIX initiative, which addresses the mechanical interfaces that surround a tester in a test cell.

The machine-vision industry, too, is riding a wave of successful standards, including Camera Link, GigE Vision, and the DCAM FireWire spec. As for de facto standards, data from the VDMA (German Engineering Federation) presented at Vision 2007 shows that sales of standard user-configurable systems, including smart cameras, are growing, while sales of custom single-application systems are falling (see "Stuttgart show highlights vision market").

But some events and comments in 2007 highlighted the limitations of standards. Consider smart cameras. Smart cameras from several vendors include standard processors and operating systems, but that doesn't make them standard enough for National Instruments. NI is not averse to supporting third-party cameras—it resells GigE Vision and FireWire cameras from Basler. But the company decided to create its own smart-camera line-up in order to ensure the cameras would represent a true LabView target that NI engineers would have complete control over, according to NI vision product manager Matt Slaughter ("Smart cameras serve as LabView targets").

Consider, too, the semiconductor EDA-to-ATE interface. Ajay Khoche of Verigy and Wu Yang of Mentor Graphics comment on the benefits of such a standard in "DFT, ATE drive yield improvement." But despite efforts such as the Semiconductor Test Consortium's STIL initiative, a commercially feasible standard EDA-to-ATE interface remains elusive. That, in part, motivated Verigy to acquire Inovys. Larry DiBattista, the senior manager at Verigy responsible for the Inovys initiative, said that Verigy and Inovys needed much tighter levels of integration with each other's respective tools to help isolate root causes of failures detected by a V93000 tester. “We really needed to establish a much tighter loop with the Inovys software,” he said, adding, “The Verigy purchase of Inovys made sense as the optimum way to provide the much tighter level of integration we needed.”

These counterexamples represent not a repudiation of standards efforts—they rather suggest a healthy tension that will drive standards' evolution as individual vendors strive for competitive advantages with proprietary approaches.