The Automated Test Blog

Embedded.com recently published an article by an engineer at On Semiconductor about their use of PXI and LabVIEW for the characterization benches.  In the article, Ray Morgan describes the benefits of this system over previous approaches, saying, among other things that “the PXI platform set a new standard for semiconductor design validation, breaking many of the paradigms and constraints of previous testing methodologies”.

I found the article particularly inersting as it articulates some common challenges I’ve been seeing in semiconductor characterization that I believe PXI and LabVIEW are very well-suited to solve.  We are, in fact, seeing a major uptick in the use of these platforms in applications such as these.  Another technolgy that I believe will be important in these applications is the user-programmable FPGA.  I discussed this trend in a previous post on Protocol Aware ATE.