When it comes to communications and cellular equipment, change is inevitable. Every month or so, new phones come out with new features and technology, making older models obsolete. Even the cell towers themselves are being regularly reconfigured to optimize networks.
Functional tests are critical to product qualification, ensuring that your systems work like they are supposed to. That is why specifying better functional test equipment is key to creating better products. Without the right equipment to power your functional tests, you can’t guarantee the quality of your products, and your systems may fail unexpectedly out in the field.
In order to create better products, you need better means of testing. From designing a new airplane engine to making updates to the defense grid, functional tests and black box testing ensure that any new products or updates meet your requirements.
Senior Product Manager Chris Gibson discusses differential signaling and measurements, and more, in a joint webinar with Anritsu.
To maintain signal integrity in an automatic test system requires:
Many accelerometers used for measuring vibration include a built-in preamplifier to transform the high impedance charge output of the piezoelectric sensor into a low impedance voltage signal, typically 100-300 ohms, that can be transmitted over longer distances. To power this preamplifier, many VTI Instruments products provide an interface that complies with the Integrated Electronics Piezo Electric, or IEPE standard. Using this standard interface ensures that you can connect sensors with an IEPE interface to a VTI instrument and get good results.
When performing functional tests, keeping test times as short as possible is often a critical requirement. Time is money, after all. One way to reduce test times is to reduce the latency in setting up signal switch paths, stimulus devices, and measurements. These can all have a significant impact on the overall time it takes to complete a full functional test of a particular DUT.
Calibration is not an option. While today's instruments are more accurate and drift less than previous generations, you still need to periodically check and calibrate your equipment. The way you do this, however, is changing.
In the past, manufacturers would recommend calibration intervals. A digital multimeter manufacturer might, for example, recommend that you calibrate the instrument once a year. When that year was up, you sent the DMM to your company's cal lab or to a third party.
That paradigm is changing. The current trend in metrology is not to blindly follow a manufacturer’s stated calibration interval, but to determine your own interval based on how much each instrument drifts over time and how much risk you're willing to take.
Interchangeable Virtual Instruments (IVI) is a standard for instrumentation drivers that is designed to reduce the time and effort needed to integrate measurement devices into new or existing systems. It does this by providing a standard application programming interface (API) that defines common measurement functions. This is, in turn, provided by a standard set of shared components that must be used by all compliant drivers and ancillary software. These components provide services to drivers and driver clients that need to be common to all drivers.
In early 2012, engineers at a prime aerospace manufacturer were assigned the task of replacing several existing integrated test adapters (ITAs) used to test multiple line replaceable units (LRUs) belonging to an Air Force program. One goal was to replace the existing ITAs with as much commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) technology as possible.
