Harnessing the power of multicore
In a recent interview, Dr. James Truchard of National Instruments discussed important trends in the test field.
Larry Maloney, Contributing Editor -- Test & Measurement World, 7/1/2008
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Q: NI has been focusing increasingly on multicore technology. What are the potential productivity gains from multicore in test?
A: Multicore chips hold great promise for test because they can handle the concurrency requirements of most I/O-based systems. The real challenge is software. Up until now, traditional programming languages have provided performance increases with each new processor generation. With multicore architectures, however, traditional programming languages won't continue to provide automatic performance benefits. As Herb Sutter of Microsoft has said, “The free lunch is over.”
Graphical languages, such as NI LabView, can represent the concurrency of a multicore system naturally. Two parallel loops can literally be drawn in parallel and will execute on separate cores. LabView automatically executes the program on the cores available to it and scales to execute on as many cores as are present in the system.
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Dr. Truchard gives more insights on changing needs in the test field and the role of virtual instruments in the continuation of this interview. |
Q: Do you see continued interest in PXI-based testing?
A: PXI is growing rapidly and expanding into new applications. In 2007, PXI vendors shipped over 15,000 systems, and the market overall is growing at over 25% annually. With continued miniaturization of semiconductor technology, vendors can fit more and more performance into PXI modules. Modules are available for high-performance RF, optical measurement, high-speed digitizers, precision digital multimeters (DMMs), and many other instruments. With the introduction of PXI Express products, which increases the backplane performance by 45X, we see growth of PXI in new applications that can benefit from very high data throughput.
Q: What is driving the growing popularity of field-programmable-gate-array-enabled instruments?
A: FPGAs are powerful because they are inherently parallel, deterministic, and reliable. They also can be defined in software. With software-reconfigurable FPGAs on modular instruments, test engineers can embed a custom algorithm into the device to perform in-line processing or emulate part of the system that requires real-time response.
Most test engineers lack the expertise to program FPGAs with traditional hardware description languages like Verilog or VHDL. LabView can target onboard FPGAs and synthesize the necessary hardware directly from a LabView program. This dramatically reduces the complexity of code development.
Q: What new automated test equipment (ATE) approaches are needed for complex semiconductors?
A: As semiconductors get more complex, testing each part completely with a traditional vector-based test methodology is increasingly difficult and expensive. Complex systems-on-a-chip (SOCs) and systems-in-a-package (SIPs) require testing at the functional level. A higher-level test methodology is called for to both reduce tester complexity and provide a tighter link back to system-level design tools.
The idea is to create a test system that can perform functional testing of a device by emulating the device in its intended surroundings. This requires the capability to model other components of the system and to interact with the device in real time.
This emulation-based ATE, also termed “Protocol-Aware ATE” during last year's International Test Conference, combines FPGA-based hardware to emulate the rest of the system in real time with the pin electronics found in traditional ATE. This both lowers the total cost of test and improves the user's ability to debug failures.
Read the continuation of this interview.
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