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 3rd and final trend is:
Expansion of Wireless and Protocol-Aware Test
In addition to emerging technological advances, software-defined instrumentation has proved ideal for rapid-growth areas such as wireless and protocol-aware test. For example, consumer electronics devices including cell phones and automotive in-dash entertainment systems often integrate multiple communication protocols and standards such as GSM, GPS, and WLAN. Test engineers using traditional instruments rely on vendors to develop dedicated, stand-alone instruments to test each standard. With software-defined instruments, engineers and researchers can test multiple standards using common modular hardware components and implement emerging and custom wireless protocols and algorithms in their test systems regardless of the maturity of a new wireless standard.
For example, Dr. Umberto Spagnolini at the Polytechnic Institute of Milan is using LabVIEW to prototype algorithms for emerging standards such as WiMAX. Researchers such as Dr. Spagnolini can directly control system parameters, including channel coding, power, and modulation scheme, while adding fading and multipath interference to determine system immunity as a prototype of emerging WiMAX algorithms.
In the semiconductor industry, the demand for increasingly functionality and integration continues unabated. As a result, semiconductor companies are heavily investing in complex systems on a chip (SoCs) and systems in a package (SiPs) technologies. It is often difficult to fully verify these devices using traditional ATE, which has led to an increased demand for so-called protocol aware test or the ability to test devices by emulating the real-world signals connected to them.
These increasing requirements for semiconductor test and the need to reduce total test costs have led industry organizations such as the Semiconductor Test Consortium (STC) and the newly founded Collaborative Alliance for Semiconductor Test (CAST) to investigate standards around open test architectures that support the integration of modular, software-defined instrumentation such as PXI into traditional semiconductor ATE. By using software-defined, FPGA-based instrumentation in these semiconductor test systems, engineers can achieve real-time responses with the standard pin electronics found in traditional ATE, lowering the total cost of test through better use-case coverage and improving the user’s ability to debug failures.