Anaheim, CA. Autotestcon has convened, with Tuesday’s keynote taking the form of a modified panel session—four separate presentations followed by overall Q&A. After a welcome from General Chair Bob Rassa and opening remarks from Technical Program Chair Mike Ellis, the panel was introduced: Dr. Fred Bloennigen, Bustec CEO; Mike Dewey, Marvin Test Solutions (MTS) director of marketing; David Salisbury, Northrup Grumman communications business development manager; Chris Geiger, technical director, Integrated Test Logistics, Lockheed Martin.
Ellis noted that presentations had been received from 10 countries representing four continents. It was evident to him from the submissions that more emphasis was being placed on software and firmware via FPGAs—he commented that in many cases, more that 50% of a test system’s functionality came from software.
The panel presentation
In a talk titled “The future of test and maintenance is distributed,” Dr. Bloennigen cited Ethernet (LXI) as an example of a network that has supported designs for decades and will continue to do so into the future. Bloennigen’s company, Bustec, does not use PXI/PXIe because the different versions of the standard are not totally backwards compatible—a critical characteristic when prime system life has been extended to 25 years and beyond. In addition, the freedom LXI affords in the choice of power-supply voltages accommodates high-performance analog subsystems.
Agreeing that weapons system life had been greatly extended, Dewey said that suppliers to the military/aerospace industry needed to support product maintenance for 25 years compared to seven for commercial vendors. He stressed the importance of scaling—having the right amount of test for an application. He too saw FPGAs replacing ASICs and being key to test system throughput. Customer interest in non-Windows operating systems prompted MTS Linux development.
He also discussed cybersecurity relative to test systems. Dewey agreed that use of modular solutions was continuing to grow and cited high-performance back planes and RF modules as facilitating growth.
In his “ATE Trends” talk, Salisbury reviewed some of the material he had previously presented at Autotestcon in 2012 and 2013. One finding was the positive benefit of sequestration, which forced cost savings through more emphasis on cross-platform systems as well as further use of COTS.
Commenting on changes following Northrup Grumman’s latest reorganization, he explained that the company looks at prime system maintenance as a fully integrated logistics/ATE/financial solution. With regard to cybersecurity, he said that networked ATE offers a perfect attack vector. In an experiment, the company created a computer virus with which it infected a software-defined radio. When that radio subsequently was tested on ATE, the ATE became infected and passed on the virus to other radios tested on that machine. Salisbury’s message was that cyber threats are real.
In his talk titled, “Future of ATS Sustainment,” Geiger discussed the conflicted role of data as part of logistics information system integration. Part of the problem is that you don’t know what you don’t know. So, predetermining which types of data to collect may limit what you can research in the future. Nevertheless, the comment was made that adding software to report additional maintenance- or performance-related data can be difficult. If software verification shows parts that are additional to the requirements document, they are considered not necessary to the system’s functioning, so are removed. This is another manifestation of test not being sufficiently involved at the beginning of a design so that the requirements document can reflect the desired level of data.
AGILE software development was mentioned because frequent test is part of the development process, so the final requirements document will have been influenced by test as it was being written.
Question and answer
Cybersecurity was discussed again during the Q&A. Someone commented that only one paper on that topic was delivered at last year’s conference, and today all four keynote speakers independently highlighted it. In the Q&A session, the question of better non-networked ATE security came up. According to Geiger, no, you’re better off in the network because you have access to the network’s monitoring facilities. You can update the system remotely. And, through augmented reality goggles, remotely located experts have access to your system and its problems.
Geiger’s message was that to ensure sustainment, we need to use data wisely. Nevertheless, the flip side of cyber attacks is that ATE must become more resilient to attack, and he claimed it was doing that.
At least one power-source company has implemented a local lockout security and safety feature to thwart cyber-attacks. If the programmability aspect of a power source is active but the output turned off, it’s not necessarily safe to work with. By having a local function that requires a code to enable, this risk is eliminated. Although there is no overall specification to ensure resilience against cyber attacks, risk identification and mitigation are key actions that no doubt will be part of one.
In addition, a question was asked about semantic interoperability. The idea was to abstract data sufficiently that it could be transmitted on classified networks of various levels.
Finally, it was observed that although gathering more data could be helpful, it’s difficult to specify exactly which data will become important. Someone commented that currently, prognostics is limited to data used to indicate the level of necessary parts support.
