The Automated Test Blog

As I stated in my last blog post, I’m planning to discuss one of three industry trends per blog entry over the next few weeks. My 2nd trend is:

Trend#2: Increased Adoption of Parallel Processing Technologies

Multicore technology has become a standard feature in automated test systems and a necessity for today’s electronic devices that are processing unprecedented amounts of data. Software-defined instrumentation takes advantage of the latest multicore processors and high-speed bus technologies to generate, capture, analyze and process the gigabytes of data required to properly design and test electronic devices. Multicore architectures can present a challenge when used with traditional text-based programming environments that are not inherently parallel and require low-level programming techniques. However, test engineers quickly can realize the benefits of multicore technology through inherently higher level programming environments such as LabVIEW, which automatically distributes multithreaded applications across multiple computing cores for maximum performance and throughput.

Many test engineers I talk to are already experiencing the challenge of programming multicore in that, for the first time, they are not seeing an increase in test system performance when updating the PC in the system. In fact, due to the potentially slower clock rates of many multicore processors, their systems may actually run slower!

On the other hand, Alejandro Torres, senior manufacturing test engineer at Sanmina-SCI, provided an example of the potential business benefits attained by using programming tools tuned for multicore technology when he stated, “By leveraging the multicore technology in LabVIEW and the latest NI multicore PXI embedded controller, we were able to increase our test throughput by one additional workday per week. Best of all, we achieved this throughput increase by simply upgrading from a previous-generation PXI single-core embedded controller to the latest NI PXI multicore embedded controller with only minimal changes to our code.”

Another area of growth for software-defined instrumentation is the increase in system-level design tools for FPGAs. Many modular instruments now come equipped with FPGAs, including several released in the past year that offer the high-performance Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA. These FPGA-based instruments provide test engineers with the ability to implement more complex digital signal processing at faster rates than ever before. Because software programs such as LabVIEW give test engineers the ability to program FPGAs without requiring knowledge of VHDL, the performance benefits of FPGAs are no longer limited to a subset of hardware engineers with extensive knowledge in digital design.

Next week, I’ll post on the third trend, the Expansion of Wireless and Protocol-Aware Test.

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.