National Instruments Touts Test Capabilities
By David Lammers
National Instruments Inc. (Austin) continues to more closely integrate design and test, aided by partners such as Mentor Graphics and implantable medical device maker Medtronic (Minneapolis, Minn.).
At last week’s NI Week, which attracted more than 3000 developers who use the LabView software development tools, Mentor Graphics won an award for add-in product of the year for the Mentor Graphics SystemVision conneXion product which allows groups in remote locations to work cooperatively.
Medtronic engineers used LabView and Mentor’s SystemVision simulation software to create virtual prototypes. The effort allowed Medtronic engineers to create test patterns as the hardware was being developed.
National Instruments is seeing rapid growth in semiconductor test, making it a separate business group recently, said Luke Schreier, a product manager in the automated test division at National Instruments. National Instruments targets products which have “big A (analog) and little D (digital),” including RF, power management, MEMS, LEDs, and other device types.
The company announced upgraded four-channel source management units (SMUs) which plug into a PXI chassis, measuring voltage or current with real-world overshoots and improved settling times. By programming an on-board Xilinx FPGA, the SMUs can be “tailored to the DUT (device under test). That shaves the test time and gives more control to the user,” Schreier said.
National Instruments engineers showed a test system capable of testing digital-analog converters (DACs) with a 200 Mhz toggle rate and clock skew edges of 30 picoseconds. The PXI-based system can test six 16-bit DACs simultaneously, he said.
Texas Instruments described a test solution which supports test sequencing across a wide variety of TI’s power management ICs (PMICs). Using LabView and NI TestStand, TI engineers created a modular, automated tester for PMICs with different communications buses and protocols. The solution combined top-level, middleware, and low-level instrument drivers, as well as software that records output sequences, according to TI engineering manager Sambit Panigrahi.
ST-Ericsson engineers described an RF characterization and validation solution that they said was far less expensive than box instruments. Sylvain Bertrand, an ST-Ericsson manager, said the PXI-based solution was three times less expensive than the box instrument product it evaluated with equivalent instrument fidelity.
With much-faster wireless protocols on the horizon, ST Ericsson engineers developed FlexSTE, using a PXI Express chassis equipped with NI’s FlexRIO modules, an NI PXIe-7962R module, and an NI PXIe-8108 controller that communicates with Windows 7 through a Gigabit Ethernet link. Each protocol is associated with a set of instructions to conduct a continuous emission pattern, write or read a register of the circuit, and read the response of the circuit on the communication bus, among other functions.
NI developed a new CompactRIO board based on an Intel quad-core i7 processor. Ray Almgren, an NI vice president of product marketing, said the Intel processor runs at 1.33 GHz, supporting eight threads on the four cores. The new CompactRIO offers 11 times the processing power of the previous model based on a single-core Freescale PowerPC processor running at 400 Mhz, he said.
Tags: Intel, Mentor, National Instruments, semiconductor test, ST-Ericsson