The Automated Test Blog

As I stated in an earlier blog post, I’m planning to discuss one of five industry trends per blog entry over the next few weeks. My 3^rd trend is:

Growing Popularity of FPGA-Enabled Instrumentation
Another area experiencing rapid expansion in the test industry is the increase in system-level tools for field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). FPGAs are powerful because they are inherently parallel, deterministic, and reliable and can be defined and reconfigured in software. While FPGAs are used inside many embedded designs, and even standalone instruments, users are not typically given access to reprogram them. More manufacturers are beginning to include open FPGAs on modular instruments and are giving test engineers the means in software to reprogram them according to their requirements. With this capability, test engineers can embed a custom algorithm into the device to perform in-line processing inside the FPGA or emulate part of the system that requires a real-time response. Historically, most test engineers do not have expertise to program FPGAs because they familiarity with hardware description languages like Verilog or VHDL which use low-level syntax to describe hardware behavior. New system-level tools are emerging that provide test engineers with the ability to rapidly configure FPGAs without writing low-level HDL code. LabVIEW, for example, can target onboard FPGAs and synthesize the necessary hardware directly from a graphical LabVIEW program, dramatically reducing the complexity of the code development. I’ve been amazed at the things our customers, who are often domain exprerts, but not experts in hardware design, have been able to accomplish with LabVIEW FPGA.  Examples include testing RFID devices performing bit-error-rate testing (BERT) of military communication protocols.

As I stated in my last blog, I’m planning to discuss one trend per blog entry over the next few weeks. The second trend in Test and Measurement is:

Growth of Software-Defined Instrumentation

One issue facing test engineers is that test instrumentation is not updated as rapidly as the devices being tested. The functionality of these complex devices is being defined by the software embedded in them, such as the Apple iPhone, which gives design engineers the ability to add features faster than ever before. This is increasingly challenging for many test engineers because most stand-alone instruments often lack the measurement capabilities of the most recent standards due to the fixed user interface and firmware that must be developed and embedded in them.
Thus, test engineers are turning to a software-defined approach to instrumentation which gives them the ability to quickly customize their measurement algorithms and user interfaces to meet specific application needs and integrate testing directly into the design process, further reducing development time. PXI is the example of a widely used software-defined instrumentation standard for building modular, reconfigurable high-performance automated test systems.

Kiran Unni, Frost & Sullivan Measurement & Instrumentation research manager, recently confirmed that PXI is influencing this trend when she stated, “The adoption of tools such as PXI is an indicator that companies recognize the benefits of moving toward software-defined instruments. The savings being realized in capital equipment, system development and improvements in system efficiency all contribute to reducing the per-unit cost of test, directly influencing the bottom line.”

This is the time of the year where you see a lot of people making their predictions on the hot trends in 2008 and beyond. Of course, as the old joke goes, predictions are hard, especially the ones about the future. But, anyway, here goes.

Since my company serves a very broad and diverse set of customers, I get the opportunity to talk to electronics designers and test engineers in applications ranging from medical devices manufacturing to high energy physics experimentation. The common thread that continues to resurface is that they are each facing the challenge of testing increasingly complicated designs with shrinking timelines and budgets. These demands have led to five major trends that I believe will significantly influence the Test and Measurement industry over the next three years. Instead of blogging them all here today, I will share one per entry over the next few weeks. The first trend is:

Increased Use of Multicore/Parallel Test Systems
Processor manufactures, such as Intel and AMD, have started developing processors with multiple cores on a single chip to continue realizing performance gains without increasing clock rates (otherwise, PCs would soon be doubling as ovens). With multicore processors, test engineers can develop automated test applications capable of achieving the highest possible throughput through parallel processing. However, this is not as easy as it sounds. Check out a few articles describing the challenge of multicore programming:
• The Free Lunch Is Over : A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software
• Dearth of tools could stall multicore onslaught

The summary is that programming multicore puts fundamentally different requirements on software, and most of today’s software tools don’t have very good native and scalable ways to deal with it. Sure, you can create a multithreaded program in C and synchronize it using textual constructs, but try scaling that to 80 cores (the number Intel plans to demonstrate by 2011). Graphical languages, however, such as NI LabVIEW, are able to elegantly represent parallel concepts; in fact, LabVIEW already automatically scales programs to multiple cores and has demonstrated significant performance improvements over single core processors.

Multicore technology is not only an opportunity to increase performance, but as Herb Sutter describes in the ‘Free Lunch’ article above, the performance improvement we have taken for granted with each generation of processor may no longer hold if our programming environment does not take advantage of the parallelism.