Innovations drive test trends

Eric Starkloff of National Instruments says that software-defined test systems are the key to providing the long-term support required for automotive, aerospace, and defense applications.

Greg Reed, Contributing Editor -- Test & Measurement World, 2/11/2008 6:00:00 AM

Eric Starkloff, director of test product marketing at National Instruments, has identified five trends that he thinks will influence the test and measurement industry in the next few years ("Top Five Trends in Test and Measurement"):

• increased use of multicore/parallel test systems,
• growth of software-defined instrumentation,
• growing popularity of field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-enabled instrumentation,
• explosion of wireless standards, and
• emulation-based ATE for system-on-a-chip (SOC) and system-in-package (SIP) testing.

Starkloff also examines each trend more fully in his blog, In "The Automated Test Blog." I recently asked him to explain why he thinks these trends will shape the test industry.

Q: What are some drivers behind these test industry trends you identify?

A: The test industry is driven by the commercial industries it serves in two ways. First, the pace of new technology introduction and the complexity of devices creates challenges in test and measurement; test engineers must make increasingly diverse and complex measurements and must be able to adapt them quickly to new requirements. Second, our industry benefits from the investment in core technologies in the much larger semiconductor and PC industries. For example, analog-to-digital converter technology driven by digital video and communication applications is used in cutting-edge digitizers, and processing targets such as multicore processors and FPGAs are used in test instruments to increase measurement performance and test throughput.

Q: How do the trends apply to automotive, aerospace, and other high-reliability applications?

A: Many automotive and aerospace test applications must remain reliable over a long period of time. Maintaining and updating a system to stand the test of time requires a framework that can be reconfigured to incorporate new technologies while maintaining backward compatibility. 

Software-defined test systems are the key to providing the long-term support these applications require. If an instrument goes obsolete during the lifetime of a tester, for example, a driver framework such as IVI (interchangeable virtual instruments) provides the means to replace it with an alternative instrument while minimizing the effect on the rest of the test system. In fact, this is one of the primary motivations of the Department of Defense's move toward synthetic instruments, where the measurement capability of the instrument is defined in software and can be changed to meet evolving requirements over the life of the system. 

The software-defined approach also can reduce the large amount of redundant capability in these systems. In 2003, the US Government Accountability Office concluded that it could save as much as $81 billion by removing redundant test hardware.

Q: It appears that the growth of software-defined instrumentation underscores a greater need for design for test (DFT). How widespread is the use of DFT among your customers?

A: I believe that we are just scratching the surface in terms of integrating design and test. Today, most of the integration that we see in our customer base is in moving data between design tools and test instruments. This is useful for generating signals directly from simulated data or comparing measured results to simulations. While this is an important step, there's a lot more we can do to lower time to market. 

We envision common software tools used for designing and simulating a new device that can be quickly connected to I/O for prototyping and then used in final verification and test. For example, in wireless communications, the algorithms used to design a receiver are the same as those used in an instrument to test a transmitter. With a common software platform that could run on different embedded targets, the algorithms used to design the device itself could also run on the tester. This is precisely what we are doing with our graphical system design software, LabView.

Q: Can you expand on the future of wireless integration?

A: Wireless is transitioning from a vertical technology in the telecommunications and military industries to a horizontal technology that will permeate virtually every type of electronic device. We have customers deploying wireless technology in everything from washing machines to medical devices to robots. 

As wireless is commoditized, there is a broad need for test engineers to be able to affordably verify and test wireless technology and to integrate these tests seamlessly with the other measurements in their system. We have one customer, for example, who needs to make wireless measurements that are tightly integrated with physical parameters, such as pressure.

Q: Do the emulation-based ATE advancements sufficiently address SOC and SIP semiconductor testing?

A: As semiconductor devices integrate more and more functionality onto a single device, test systems will have less access to individual signals and subcomponents. Increasingly, the test of these devices will be performed at a system functional level, similar to the trend we have already seen play out in board-level test. 

Emulation-based ATE refers to system-level testing of semiconductor chips, where the tester emulates the other components that the chip will interface to, testing it in its intended surroundings. This approach requires the stimulus-response approach of functional test,but with the speed and real-time response required for high-volume semiconductor manufacturing. Programmable FPGAs in the test equipment offer a potential platform for performing these tests and responding to the device in real time.