Technical glitches. They're a part of life. Some are just an annoyance, while others are very costly—can you say Y2K? Worse yet, they promise to be much costlier in the future. No doubt you've noticed that the world economy is depending more and more on communications. As a result, design engineers are under increased pressure to build ultra-reliable devices. In other words, a communications device must work out of the box and continue to work flawlessly until it is replaced. To produce such products, designers need great test tools.
Testing prototypes is no easy task. Clock speeds are skyrocketing, bandwidths are ballooning, IC geometries are shrinking, and connections are disappearing. To date, designers appear to have the tools necessary to test and debug their prototypes. But how about three to five years down the line? Will designers still be using general test equipment, such as DSOs, logic analyzers, and meters, to test their communications prototypes? In my opinion, yes. But I also expect specialized test equipment to become more prevalent on the design bench.
General test equipment saw some interesting developments last year. For the first time, a DSO—Agilent's Infinium—was endowed with voice-recognition capability. Should all DSOs offer this feature in the future, at least as an option? I think so, because probing a board is difficult. Designers need test instruments that make probing easier, not harder, and voice recognition is one way to do this.
DSOs Get Specific
DSOs have long been seen as general-purpose instruments. But in the last few years, they've targeted specific industries, such as telecommunications, data communications, and computing. Both design and test engineers often have to make very specific measurements because of interoperability and compliance requirements. We've reported on this trend in recent years, and it will certainly continue in the future. We may actually see instruments that are specifically labeled "communications scopes," "computing scopes," or other types of scopes, rather than "general DSOs."
We're also seeing the integration of web servers into test instruments. Such a feature lets designers control instruments like logic analyzers from remote locations. Just as we all log on to the Internet today to get stock prices and sports scores, in the future, we'll be able to check waveforms on our test gear from anywhere at any time.
Generally, though, last year's big breakthroughs in general test equipment came in acquisition speed and memory—faster and deeper, as they say. These kinds of improvements are necessary in order to keep pace with the "bleeding edge" of technology, and they will continue well on into the future.
As Mike Lauterbach, director of product management at LeCroy, explains it, testing and troubleshooting a board requires a long acquisition memory. And then to compute the answers—the application-specific answers—a good processing engine with lots of RAM is necessary.
"In the best of all possible worlds," says LeCroy's Lauterbach, "you can buy yourself a really nice general-purpose oscilloscope and have this customized test package that does what you want when you have to make specific measurements."
Lauterbach also thinks that clock inputs, which LeCroy now has on its scopes, will be a key feature for communications work in the future. "The ability to supply an external clock into the communications testing device is a key element," he notes. "It's something that the general-purpose market does not ask for, but the communications market absolutely stresses it."
Last year, we also saw DSOs decrease in physical size in one case (the Tektronix TDS 3054), and increase in display size in another (the LeCroy Waverunner). If these trends continue, we soon may see 1-GHz or higher palm DSOs, along with scopes featuring display sizes as large as some modern notebooks. It's all about test equipment leveraging off advances in PC technology.
This will continue to occur, not only in hardware but in software as well. We've already seen examples of test equipment employing the Windows operating system, and more are on the way. A Windows OS brings a familiar look and feel to test equipment, while enabling test-equipment manufacturers to easily add features like connectivity and printer support.
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