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Test engineers in industries ranging from aerospace and defence to consumer electronics are facing the challenge of testing increasingly complicated designs with shrinking timelines and budgets. To address these issues, engineers and scientists are incorporating new test and measurement technologies that are capable of meeting complex design requirements without raising costs. National Instruments (Nasdaq: NATI), a worldwide leader in automated test solutions, has identified five trends it anticipates will significantly influence the test and measurement industry over the next three years.
“Companies are turning to the latest technologies including PXI, FPGAs and multicore processors to develop high-performance test systems that can meet consumer demand for higher-quality products,” said Eric Starkloff, National Instruments Director of Test Product Marketing. “Fortunately, more technology vendors are developing industry-standard tools capable of solving problems that previously depended on expensive, dedicated test systems.”
Increased Use of Multicore/Parallel Test Systems
To continue realising performance gains without increased clock rates, processor manufacturers are developing processors with multiple cores on a single chip. With multicore processors, test engineers can
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develop automated test applications capable of achieving the highest possible throughput through parallel processing. To enable parallel processing, engineers traditionally had to learn complex constructs such as threading libraries and mutexs to achieve parallel programming in a text-based programming language. Using graphical data flow programming software such as NI LabVIEW, engineers immediately benefit from multicore processors because the language is inherently parallel and can automatically scale user applications based on the total available number of cores.
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 most smartphones, 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 customise their equipment and user interfaces to meet
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