New-Tech Europe | April 2016 | Digital edition

can get better IP leverage between the depot and field testers for in-situ troubleshooting and diagnostics. As you can imagine, the RF challenges of scalability, synchronization, and latency create complex system- level test architectures for the test engineer and are quite different than replacing the legacy oscilloscope and mitigating TPS rehosting costs, though both technology elements are great opportunities for the test engineer to provide significant value to the organization. Increasing Sphere-of-Influence to Reduce the Cost of Test A third, and maybe more subtle, pain point for test engineers is justifying short-term spend to mitigate long- term operational costs. Market pressures are as high as they have ever been, so test engineers are opting for point-solutions that neither provide the scalability for evolving technology demands nor have an architecture that simplifies maintenance for future upgradeability. Furthering this problem is the fact that this short-term spend may not actually come directly from the test engineering budget. Looking upstream, we all know how difficult it can be to get a design engineer to modify a design once it meets the design specifications, but organizations can see significant improvements to their bottom line by engaging the test engineering group early as part of a Design For Test (DFT) or Design for Manufacturability (DFM) strategy. When yields improve and asset utilization increases, these optimizations typically go directly to the gross margin of the product. Beyond DFM, it’s also critical that the test engineers be involved early in the new product introduction (NPI) process. By actively engaging in every stage-gate of NPI, the test engineer can be developing product-

There are inefficient and costly flaws with the traditional approach of engaging test engineering late in the NPI process. Engaging earlier in the design cycle can lead to faster time-to-market, lower manufacturing cost, and improved yield.

Many organizations have different business units for the develop/ deploy and support/maintain costs of a test system. Test engineers can greatly impact the operational costs of supporting a system, but must expand their influence beyond their own organization to understand and implement solutions to mitigate the long-term costs of supporting an ATE system.

field, your test cases are far more inclusive than the “did we build it right” manufacturing test case. You will need to emulate the real-world environment with highly synchronized signal sources including closed-loop control between the sources and analyzers to stress the DSP engine and measure the phase-coherency of the system. To address the synchronization and data transfer challenges, test engineers need to look beyond traditional boxed instrumentation to a platform-based approach such as PXI. To emulate the real-world environment with closed- loop control, engineers need flexible

RF instrumentation architecture that combines data streaming architectures, FPGA-based signal processing, and high-performance, high-instantaneous bandwidth RF front-end technology to capture and process the incoming pulses. It’s also no secret that operational costs are high when sending units back to the intermediate- (I-) or depot- (D-) Level centers for maintenance or repair. As RF test equipment becomes easier to adopt in field test, these operational costs greatly improve. Not only does the organization benefit from the decrease in operational cost, but they

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