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 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.

In February, I wrote about the new mobile internet and how our online behavior would radically change based on the ubiquity of mobile devices with internet connectivity.  I recently read a column on MarketWatch by John Dvorak that also spoke on this subject.  In his commentary, Dvorak asserts that there will be four critical trends in the computer industry in the coming decade:

• There will be a major platform shift away from the current Wintel machine
• Mobile devices will become more and more important
• Internet connectivity will be done mostly on mobile devices, primarily the cell phone
• Cloud computing will dominate the century

Those of you that have a mobile device with elegant internet connectivity (I’m an unabashed iPhone fan myself) have no doubt witnessed this change first hand.  My PC is no longer my primary portal to the internet – I read most of my news and do nearly all my google-ing, ebay-ing, Wikipedia-ing, and now, even FaceBook-ing, on my mobile device.  I’m actually more accustomed to interacting with the internet on my phone now than I am on my computer.  And we’re really only in the second generation of the mobile internet.  Add better user interface through brighter OLED displays, more sensors, haptics so you can ‘feel’ objects on the screen (Blackberry announced one attempt at this today with their new touchscreen ‘Storm’), and broadband connection speeds through WIMAX and LTE, and imagine the capability that will be delivered on a mobile device.

Of course, since I work in the test and measurement industry, I can’t help but think about what effect this change in the consumer industry will have on ours.  For one, there is a lot of sophisticated technology on these devices to test, and the pace of innovation is only increasing.  So, design and test engineers need rapid development platforms that can adapt to these changes faster than ever.  I believe that this trend will affect our industry in an even more profound way as well.  Today, the PC is the primary business machine – it is our data storage hub, our desktop publisher, our presentation aid, our engineering design workstation, and our business dashboard.  As mobile computing and internet devices become pervasive in everyday life, how is this likely to change?  What will cloud computing mean to the engineering community?  This is a subject I’ll be thinking a lot about and plan to share some thoughts on in a later blog. 

But for now, I need to get back to the internet to do some research on wireless standards.  And, since I’m writing this on my laptop, that means time to shut down my PC and pick up my iPhone!

Wireless mobile devices will fundamentally change the way we use and interact with the Internet. As I’ve posted before, I am a unabashed iPhone user. And I’ve started to notice some curious things about my use of the Internet now that its with me all the time and easily accessible. For one, my Internet usage has gone up by an order of magnitude. I don’t think I’m exaggerating – I literally mean 10x. And let’s be clear, I was already a heavy Internet user. Now I use it 10 times more. This also means I access the Internet on my phone at least 10 times more than I do on my PC. I’ve grown so accustomed to the device that I find myself surfing the web on it while sitting in front of my laptop. I have also noticed that my expectations for Internet content has changed. For example, my expectation for real time content has gone up dramitically. I check news sites like cnn.com several times each hour and expect news updates. No new headlines in the last 20 minutes? Maybe I should try another site. I also notice that I use the device to augment my own knowledge on the fly by searching acronyms, names, etc., while in conversation or in a meeting. I don’t think I’m at all alone in this trend: Google recently reported that 50 times more traffic from iPhone users than from other mobile devices. Think about that – 50 times! When you make a tool like Google more accessible, dramatic things can happen. I’ve also talked to several colleagues (NI has a density of iPhone users that I doubt is topped anywhere outside of Cupertino), and they report a similar phenomena.

So, the question is, what is driving this change? I think first and foremost, we’re starting to really see the impact of ubiquitous wireless connectivity. The iPhone happened to make the full Internet available in way that is as good or better than the experience on the PC. Once the Internet makes the jump to wireless devices, the dynamic of the Internet will really change. The PC will quickly become irrelevant as an Internet device – the number of mobile devices (>1 billion per year) dwarfs the number of PCs (about 250 million per year). As Bolaji Ojo of EEtimes recently stated in his article Wireless is everywhere, ignore it at your peril, “the search is over for the next killer app…it is wireless”.

As an extension of my own personal iPhone observations, I think the new wireless Internet will have some of the following attributes:

• Usage an order of magnitude greater than the current web;
• Significantly increased demand for real time information;
• A two way communication portal, not just an information source (Web 2.0);
• Optimized primarily for mobile devices, not PCs.

It will get even more interesting as the wireless data bandwidth explodes with standards such as WiMAX and LTE. 2008 should be a fascinating year for wireless, particularly, the wireless Internet.

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.

 

I came across an interesting blog post by Richard A. Quinnell, Technical Editor — Test & Measurement World.  In his blog, he made the following statement, “With just about everything going wireless, I’ve started wondering when PXI will join the parade.”  I felt a response by our PXI Marketing Group Manager, Richard McDonell would be appropriate.  

Guest Blogger: Richard McDonell – PXI Group Manager

Every day I learn about another common device that has gone wireless…from cell phones to game controllers to PCs and laptops.  In each of these cases, the wireless interface is replacing a previously wired solution providing increased range, improved flexibility, and added user-convenience.  These are great benefits, so why hasn’t PXI gone wireless?  Well, in many ways it already has.  PXI is already being used to design and test thousands of wireless devices and you can use a wireless (802.11) LAN interface to transfer data to other systems or back to a network location.  Wireless LAN interfaces can also be used for controlling your PXI systems remotely.   

So why not decouple each PXI module from a wired PXI bus and connect them using a wireless protocol?  Technically, there is no reason why you couldn’t do this.  The real question is do you really want to?  Unfortunately, the convenience of a wireless interface doesn’t come without tradeoffs in performance, setup ease-of-use, and cost.  The core benefits of PXI come from the shared card cage architecture, the high bandwidth and low latency PCI and PCI Express bus, and integrated timing and synchronization (I suppose this could also count as “wireless” since PXI eliminates the need for most external trigger and synchronization cables).  Separating each PXI module into its own separate sub-system via WiFi would dilute the benefits of PXI and significantly decrease the performance (due to increased bus latency), cost (due to dedicated fans, power supplies, and boxes per device), and synchronized measurement accuracy (due to a lack of triggering) that PXI offers in its current state compared to traditional standalone instrumentation.  You would however retain the user-defined software aspects of PXI in such a configuration which is a key component of PXI’s measurement flexibility and reuse.   

Thus, I do not feel wireless PXI in the form of discrete PXI devices connected via wireless interface is worth the effort.  However, I would agree PXI is the ideal platform for designing and testing wireless devices and that it enables higher performance, lower cost, and improved flexibility in most test and control applications today.

I just read the latest 2007 Test and Measurement Salary Survey. One of the questions that really peaked my interest was on the topic of what technologies are engineers being required to learn. The number one test platform listed was PXI (20% of readers listed it), with PXI Express, an extension to PXI, a close second. This is just another example of the increasing industry adoption of PXI. Most of the other technologies engineers are being asked to learn are communication protocols – Firewire, WLAN, and WiMAX were all high in the ranking.

I just saw another example of what we call a VBA, a “van-based acquisition”. It turns out that in RF applications, virtual instrumentation is particularly common when customers need portability and real-time data streaming. There aren’t a lot of commercial products to solve this application, but a PXI-based system can handle most of these requirements at a very low cost. Here is the latest example I just received of a VBA:

“The customer was looking for a completely mobile RF spectral monitoring application. They want to have a DC-based system mounted in their vehicles and they want to drive through areas and monitor a band of secure radio channels and signal strengths for those channels. The main requirements of the system are portability, quick spectral acquisition and storage (stream-to-disk) and time/location stamping for each spectral sweep.

This is a unique application that requires a small form-factor, stream-to-disk capabilities and GPS stamping. It can solved today with commercial off the shelf PXI products”

Other PXI-based VBAs are deployed in military applications (either looking for “signals of interest” or jamming them), ground-based transceiver testers, commercial spectral monitoring systems, and cell-phone coverage mapping applications.