Dave Ireland, technical marketing manager at Tektronix talks to Electronics Weekly about PC-based instruments and the growing importance of software development in the test market
Q. What are the most important parameters in test instrument design?
Dave Ireland - With each new generation of technology, the test instruments we use to validate functionality over the full operating range must have enough performance to give confidence in the measured results.
Usability is critical too – small details can make a huge difference when making measurements, right from the probe tip all the way to presentation of the measured results on the screen.
Q. How would you characterise the European test market at present?
Dave Ireland - Customers continue to tell us that they are under increasing pressure to get their products to market more quickly and efficiently, however the recent credit crunch has made it more difficult for companies to fund the capital investments they need to achieve this.
Customers are also becoming more mindful of the cost of ownership of their equipment investments.
More generally, we have seen demand for our validation and test tools improve steadily so far in 2010.
Q. What are your views on the importance of PC-based test systems?
Dave Ireland - PC-based test systems can take on different complexions depending on the customer application needs.
All of our products have displays so that they can be used in standalone user mode, or can be connected to an external PC via USB or LAN interfaces for remote control and data analysis, which tend to be more popular in the bench and mid-range product categories.
Higher performance products also have a PC embedded within them which allows them to integrate industry-standard software – such as LabView and MatLab – very easily. PC-based test systems are important whether they are implemented through an external PC or embedded on the instrument itself.
When customers are looking to support the most demanding R&D applications, they tend to use high-performance standalone products because they need a best feature set with comprehensive analysis tools which are not typically found in lower-cost PC-based instruments.
Q. How would you characterise the company’s plans for the low- to mid-priced test market?
Dave Ireland - Oscilloscopes are the primary tool used by engineers to debug and validate operation of their embedded systems.
Oscilloscopes are perfect for viewing what is going on a device under test, and resolving good from bad signals, but we recognise that designers need a range of complementary products to validate proper operation of their devices.
Our aim is to equip embedded system designers with all the debug tools they need to accomplish their task: from oscilloscopes, to signal sources used to stimulate a device-under-test, to precision digital multimeters and other classes of instruments.
Q. What part will software play in the future of the test business?
Dave Ireland - Software is playing an increasingly important role in the test and measurement business.
As customers’ designs become faster and more complex (for example, when adopting new serial communication buses), they need to make complex measurements much faster, as well as debug and validate serial protocols beyond the physical layer.
For example, embedded system designs are increasingly replacing internal parallel buses with serial buses such as I2C, SPI, and CAN, and again software can play an important role here. On a serial bus, a single signal may include address, control, data, and clock information.
Intelligent software embedded in oscilloscopes allows debugging at a protocol level for low speed serial buses I2C, SPI, RS-232/422/485/UART, CAN and LIN.
Tektronix