The Automated Test Blog

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.

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Posted in Automated Test, LabVIEW, multicore, Intel, Test Engineer