If you’re a typical user of test gear, you’ve most likely been looking at the same old equipment for a few years now. In these tough economic times, it’s not surprising that upgrades of potentially big-ticket items like oscilloscopes, spectrum and network analyzers, and other testbench staples have been put on the back burner. But while you’re hunkered down with your old warhorse scope, the industry’s test-equipment vendors are readying themselves for when you will need to upgrade.
And whether you like it or not, you will need to upgrade eventually. If your current design project doesn’t outstrip your equipment’s bandwidth or frequency range (Fig. 1), your next one probably will.
In the not-too-distant future, your testbench will be populated with equipment with greater bandwidths and broader frequency response. It will be a tightly integrated testbench, either because you’ll have instruments that pack multiple forms of functionality within one box, or because the standalone instruments will be able to share data and measurement setups.
And, it’s not unlikely that you’ll at least consider a modular setup that will allow you to swap functionality in and out, enabling quick on-the-fly changeovers for application-specific testing requirements.
Due to the economic crunch, many test engineering groups are operating under tight budgetary constraints. Thus, when they look to upgrade the bench, they will want to add new measurement capabilities and not simply replace what they already have. What will a new instrument do for them that the previous generation couldn’t?
The challenge for the industry’s test and measurement vendors will be to add new capabilities and increase the performance of its offerings without adding bells and whistles that don’t bring substantial value. Moreover, the test engineer wants these new capabilities without making the instrument overly difficult to use or to remember how to use should some time pass between instances of its use.
According to Scott Stever, general-purpose instrument planner for Agilent Technologies’ Systems Products Division, there are two broad groups among test and measurement customers. One is the “classic” customer, whose environment is reasonably stable and doesn’t change much over time. The other group is on a fast technology track and is trying to keep up with the end-product complexity curve.
“In the digital world, this may be driven by data rates and clock speeds. In the communications world it might be dealing with new standards,” says Stever.
Much of the world is still evolving from traditional analog communications to more current digital methods, with the cellular handset on the bleeding edge of that evolution. But in any communications realm, designs are moving from simple analog, scalar modulation methods to more complex digital and vector modulation techniques.
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