The Automated Test Blog

There is no doubt that we now are facing an economic headwind. Customers I’ve visited around the world are trying to understand how this headwind will affect their business and what they can do to put themselves in the best position to weather this storm, and perhaps even come out of this down cycle stronger than they are now. More and more test engineers are looking at how to optimize their approach to test more with less.

Testing more with less means that you may have to reevaluate your approach to test, and indeed, it is in disruptive conditions such as we now face that new ideas are the most prone to take hold. I believe that modular, software defined test systems provide the greatest opportunity for testing more with less – regardless of the dimension where optimization is needed. For example, optimizing the test speed of a production system is often the best path to decreasing test costs. For other applications, reconfiguring a single tester to test multiple devices yields the best results. And in very complex testers, the capital cost may the focus for cost reduction. For each of these situations, and in many others, the software-defined approach has proven time and time again to deliver dramatic improvements.

Let me share a few examples. In a production system, time is, quite literally, money. If you can reduce test time by ½, then you may be able to put half the number of testers at the end of a line. Wireless devices, in particular, are often expensive and time consuming to test. Many cellular phones are still tested with a inefficient method called “call-processing”. In this approach, a device called a “one-box tester” is used to actually simulate a phone call to the device under test. Bringing a phone up into a call is slow and is unnecessary to test if the device is correctly assembled. This would be like testing a television by watching a movie on it, instead of simply sending it a test pattern and verifying the result. More and more cellular handset manufacturers are moving to a software-defined test system that instead tests the physical layer signal of the device and uses signal processing in software to perform the necessary tests to verify each type of wireless standard. This technique is often 2-5 times faster than call-processing, which results in huge savings for the manufacturer.

Another example of achieving cost savings with a modular, software-defined approach is to use the flexibility of software to reconfigure a system to test many different types of devices. Another challenge in wireless test is that many devices have multiple wireless standards. My beloved iPhone, for example, now has 5 radios! Often, these different standards have required different instruments with their own vendor-defined measurement routines. A software-defined system can be reconfigured to test each standard with the same hardware. And when standards inevitably change and evolve, a software-defined system is in a much better position to be able to react to these changes.

A final example is in semiconductor ATE. Many semiconductor devices are tested on so-called “Big iron” testers. These testers have the sophisticated digital infrastructure and pin-electronics to test high performance semiconductors such as processors and SOCs. For simpler devices with low target prices, such as a MEMs sensor or an RFID, however, these testers may be overkill. Because they have the infrastructure to support high performance, it is difficult to scale them to these simpler requirements. A modular, open system such as PXI, though, has a very low entry cost and can be configured with only the minimum required capability, which results in lower capital expenditure.

So, in these turbulent economic times, it will be up to test engineers to innovate using the latest technology to meet the challenges of testing more with less. And those companies and individuals that do this the best will be able to come out of this difficult time stronger than before and ready to take advantage of new opportunities as conditions improve.

As recently discussed in a post by Rick Nelson of Test and Measurement World magazine, the Semiconductor Test Consortium (STC) has begun work on defining a Portable Test Instrument Module (PTIM) - a standard plug-in module for performing ancillary measurements on existing semiconductor ATE.  My colleague, Luke Schreier, delivered a presentation at the last STC global meeting that was very well-received which proposed PXI as a suitable specification to build from.   The business case is very compelling - traditional ATE architectures are built to accommodate the densest and highest speed test pins possible - 1 kilowatt of power per board is not uncommon.  This is necessary for the high speed digital electronics needed to test the latest processors, for instance.  When you need to add some audio or RF measurements into the system, however, the infrastructure can be overkill.  Moreover, to fully integrate an instrument into a tester requires expertise of the ATE vendor, so to make these measurements, the vendor may be required to invest significantly in development of measuement functionality already available on the open market, just in other form factors.

It is interesting to me that the semiconductor test industry is recognizing some of the features we designed into the original PXI specification.  In fact, one of the slides we used to use in the early days of PXI showed a set of rack and stack instruments on one side and a “big iron” semiconductor tester on the other, with PXI right in the middle.  The point was that PXI borrowedconcepts from both of these markets - the measurement quality from box instruments, and the card modular form factor and integrated timing and synchronization from semiconductor ATE.  It looks like after 10 years, its finally come full circle.

I was recently invited to give a talk at the VLSI Test Symposium titled “Migration of PXI Instruments into Semiconductor Test“. The session focused on emerging trends in semiconductor ATE and on work that is currently going on in both vendors consortia, to migrate PXI into semiconductor test applications. The presentation covered the key challenges currently facing engineers that are validating and testing increasingly complex devices such as SoCs and SiPs. As I previously blogged, Protocol Aware ATE is a new technique for testing these complex devices at a system level. In the presentation, I also covered existing work to build semiconductor ATE based on PXI, including examples of augmenting existing ATE, creating testers with a PXI measurement core, and work by the Semiconductor Test Consortium on a Portable Test Instrument Module, or PTIM. The PTIM initiative is designed to provide a way to add ancillary measurement capability to existing ATE platforms. The STC has been evaluating various options and has the desire to standardize PTIM on an exiting industry standard. PXI has been proposed as the PTIM platform and is currently being discussed at the Global STC Conference this week in San Diego. This proposal will enable ATE customers and vendors to leverage the large commercial investment in PXI and extend ATE capability by using the 1500 existing PXI modules currently available.

Last week, I was in China for a conference. The economy continues to boom there; its amazing to see how much has changed since my last trip just two years ago. The skyline in Shanghai has grown immeasurably, the piracy and knock off brands have been pushed ‘underground’ (though, its still pretty easy to get a fake Rolex), and the evidence of China’s growing middle class is apparent - its almost as easy to get a real Rolex now at the many upscale shops around town. But one of the most pronounced changes is the growing pollution in Shanghai and Beijing. I only flew through Beijing, but I couldn’t even see the terminal from our plane as we taxied in. As one of my colleagues noted, you could look right at the sun, which was only a soft glow behind the yellow smog. Shanghai wasn’t quite as bad, but as we drove into the city, we all noticed our sinuses clogging and a distinct itch in the back of our throats. Another colleague attempted to take a jog in the city, but gave up after a few blocks.

So that raises the question that everyone has been asking: How is Beijing going to host the world’s premier athletic competition in a mere few months? The Chinese have instituted a decade long plan to clean up Beijing’s air, but opinions vary on how well it has worked so far (and my experience last week would suggest that it hasn’t). There are also more drastic contingencies planned, such as shutting down factories, restricting automobiles, and even seeding clouds to force rain, in an effort to “cleanse the air”. Some athlete’s aren’t so confident - one of the world’s premier marathon runners today announced that he may pull out of the Olympic due to health concerns related to the pollution.

So what’s the long term solution to the pollution in China and elsewhere around the world? Probably not restricting traffic or seeding clouds. The problem will be ultimately solved through consumer demand and engineering innovation, or green engineering . Consumer demand is what is causing the huge uptick in green products and corporate sustainability plans. Sure, there is a lot of hype out there (now called “Greenwashing“), but the net effect of all the focus on environmental sensitivity is a positive one. Even more sustainable are the discoveries and innovations in the scientific and engineering community. China’s pollution, for example, is primarily the result of coal power plants (a new plant opens in China every week to 10 days) and automobiles. Both of these industries are seeing huge investments in research to fund cleaner, more sustainable alternatives. The global investments in renewable energy reached $100B in 2006 and its projected to grow to more than $750B in the next 10 years. Research abounds in more efficient solar, wind, and even wave energy production. There is also a large investment in researching and productizing alternative fuel and zero emissions vehicles.  We don’t yet know which of these innovations will prove most successful, but innovation, combined with a capitalistic system which rewards it, will ultimately triumph.  Its only a matter of time before these inventions are not just a novelty, but a economically sustainable business delivering zero emissions but also better performance and lower cost of ownership than their fossil fuel predecessors. It might not be in time for the Beijing Olympics, but hopefully it will be in time to clean the air for the next generation of China’s urban population.

OK, time for the last of my 5 trends in test for 2008:

Emulation-Based ATE That Improves System-on-a-Chip and System-in-a-Package Testing

As semiconductor devices become more complex, the process of testing each part completely with a traditional vector-based methodology is increasingly difficult. Complex systems-on-a-chip(SoCs) and systems-in-a-package (SiPs) require a system-level functional test more closely related to testing components placed on a printed circuit board than a typical chip test, but they still require the high speeds demanded in production test for the semiconductor industry. The strategy of testing a device by emulating actual real-world signals provides a better method of functional test for these types of high-speed systems. This emulation-based ATE, or 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 lowers the total cost of test through better use-case coverage and improves the user’s ability to debug failures. I explained this idea in more detail in a recent blog post. In 2008, I expect more vendors to incorporate elements of emulation-based tests into traditional tester architectures and for more users to incoproate platforms currently used in functional test, such as PXI, into chip validation and test applications.

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 4th trend is:

The Explosion of Wireless Standards
Test engineers are facing new challenges as the use of wireless technolgies is rapidly expanding. This was a hot topic during the recent CES 2008 conference. One article covering CES, stated “Today’s young people might be called the wired generation, but judging from this year’s Consumer Electronics Show they might not have to deal with actual wires for much longer.” Below are few examples of products that have traditionally been “wired”, but are now becoming “wireless” devices:

• • Apple Time Capsule, which is a 1 terabyte wireless hard-drive using 802.11n.
  • GM Vehicle-to-Vehicle technology, cars are becoming wireless network that can broadcast position, speed, heading to surrounding cars.
  • Samsung flat-panel wireless TV, that receives its data from an 802.11n transmitte

As Wireless transitions from a vertical industry into a horizontal application, more and more test engineers will be faced with the challenge of testing RF wireless capability. Soon, RF instrumentation could become as ubiquitous as general-purpose instruments such as digital multimeters. This growth in adoption requires test engineers to learn wireless protocols and keep pace with the rapid introduction of new standards. This trend was reflected in the 2007 Test & Measurement World Salary Survey (which I blogged about late last year), in which subscribers across engineering disciplines were asked to identify the top technologies they are being required to learn. Among the top responses were WLAN and WiMax.

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.

My friend and colleague Ian Bell, Marketing Manager of our UK office, has started a blog as part of the publication Electronics Weekly. I, of course, welcome him to the blogging community. In merely his third blog, however, Ian has picked a fight with me. Not intentionally, of course. He could have blogged about something slightly less polarizing, like politics or religion, but, no, he had to go after something really controversial - the iPhone. You see there are two types of people in world, those that enjoy the pleasures of ownership of one of the greatest electronic devices of the decade, and the jealous majority that haven’t seen the light and thus fill their days talking about how over-hyped and unoriginal the iPhone is. If you haven’t figured it out yet, I am of the former camp, while Mr. Bell is of the later.

I’ve resisted blogging about the iPhone…its already over-hyped, nearly cliche. What else can I add? But I feel compelled to respond. Mr. Bell notes that “Apple invented nothing in the iPhone”. He couldn’t be more wrong. By this definition, anything built on top of pre-existing technology components is not invention. He also notes, like so many other iPhone haters before him, all the technical features it lacks. I think this is, in fact, Apple’s greatest contribution of all. As engineers, we are constantly tempted to add features into our designs. The products we use every day don’t have too few features, but rather too many. What we have too often lost is the elegance and simplicity that comes from making hard choices in our designs. The iPhone developers, for example, didn’t include 3G capability. A ridiculous oversight in 2007, you say? I say my phone is slimer with better battery life than any 3G phone I’ve seen - and WiFi hotspots are becoming more and more ubiquitous. They also ‘left off’ GPS. Yet, I have an software application on my iPhone that uses WiFi and cell phone towers to triangulate my position. Not perfect in wide open spaces, but on a recent trip to New York City, it gave me sub-block accuracy. It also can give me the position of my friends and family, by the way. As they have demonstrated many times before, Apple’s greatest contribution is their focus and restraint - the ability to understand what matters and sets them apart (Great software, a beautiful screen, the touch interface, sensors that works like magic, a slim design, and simple synchronization) and make the tough calls to not bloat the feature set with everything else.

I could go on all day…but I want to draw at least one parallel with the test industry. Apple made the decision to put a disproportionate amount of their resources in the software running on the phone - betting that through software they could deliver usability, integration, and features at a level never before available in a handheld device. My guess is that they have at least twice the number of software developers as their competitors. At NI, we have taken a similar approach to measurement and automation. We have placed our bet on the power of PC technology and software-defined measurement devices. We invest disproportionally in our drivers and application software and have been able to deliver a platform that continues to get more powerful and flexible through software.

Welcome to the blogosphere, Ian.