Evaluation Engineering - 7

Fumitoshi Ide, product manager, Data
Acquisition Field Design Division at
Hioki USA: "Control circuit boards and
control devices have been reaching new
levels of performance in recent years in
a diverse range of fields, including automobiles, power devices, and aerospace.
These increases in performance are driving growth in the number of test points,
creating demand for the ability to measure more than 100 signal channels at
high speed."
Bernard Ang, product marketing at
Keysight Technologies: "We feel a few
megatrends are driving the innovation
of the DAQ systems and technologies.
Industry 4.0's growing usage of robotic
arms, sensors, and automation is expected
to be driven by the IIoT. This technology
trend of IIoT with intelligent manufacturing will require various sensors to
be deployed in the ecosystem. As the
demand for connected devices increases
alongside growing demands for more centralized applications with data analytics
to be performed remotely, a strong and
efficient communications protocol test
and connected DAQ systems is needed."

Challenges
What are the biggest challenges vendors
are facing when it comes to making innovations in data acquisition systems?
Anderson, Measurement Computing: "The
increases in digital-to-analog converter
technology has slowed as the market becomes satisfied with the current speed/
resolution curves of today and chip manufacturers put more emphasis into developing low-power ICs. With this maturation
of DAQ technologies, new products cannot
rely on simply better DAQ performance,
but rather greater O/S and computer support along with ease-of-use features for
continued growth."
Huy Nguyen, sales manager, aerospace &
defense at Diversified Technical Systems
(DTS): "Customers are adding more channels to tests, but they still need ultra-low
size, weight and power (SWaP). Especially
with hyper velocity missile development
and unmanned platforms, they are

looking for alternative DAQ that can fit
onboard test articles."
Ang, Keysight: "At Keysight, our biggest
DAQ challenges include:
* Ensure product stability and accuracy for users. We have implemented
autocalibration features to reduce
temperature drift error and internal
drift error due to time.
* Make the calibration processes simple and less cumbersome. One of the
ways we have accomplished this is
to remove the need to calibrate individual modules; we only calibrate
the DAQ mainframe.
* Make our new DAQ970A backward
traceable and a drop-in replacement
for its predecessors concerning
functionality, software coding, and
specifications.
* Ability to synchronize with peer instruments such as power supplies,
signal sources, and more, using Keysight's BenchVue application software
without software programming.
* A lot of effort put into ease-of-setup
because of many DAQ modules with
different behaviors and functions
* Ensuring multiple channel synchronization and setup works perfectly
and reliably over time."
Chitalwala, Yokogawa: "As energy efficient technologies gain wider adoption,
the need for reliability in testing for efficiency, performance, and safety has
become greater. As innovators and precision makers, it is always challenging
to design and develop test instruments
to meet the ever-changing demands
of design and development engineers.
High resolution, faster sampling, high

accuracy, isolation, compact size, easeof-use and cost-effectiveness-combining
all these attributes into one instrument
is a challenge. Designing equipment with
customer parts versus COTS devices has
its own tradeoffs."
Molly Bakewell Chamberlin, strategic
technical marketing agent for Silicon
Designs, and Kati Cole, director of sales
and marketing at Silicon Designs: "Silicon
Designs has always maintained the philosophy of "let the customer drive R&D."
To Silicon Designs, that means that their
core competency remains the design and
manufacture of rugged, accurate, industrial-grade MEMS capacitive accelerometer modules and chips. As such, all current
and future plans for their G-Logger data
acquisition systems will be entirely derived from any customer expressed need
for additional features or functionality
to better support individual customer
test setups. Any future R&D efforts at
Silicon Designs specific to the G-Logger
will therefore be derived entirely from
customer feedback and special requests,
as to any next-generation features. The
company has no plans to segue into the
DAQ market beyond their G-Logger product, which exists as a helpful accessory for
Silicon Designs customers."

What are customers asking for?
With demand for better data acquisition
as a constant, what specific features are
customers asking vendors to provide?
Jesudowich, imc DataWorks: "Turnkey solutions-full instrumentation including

Keysight's Model DAQ970A Data Acquisition System, with modules stacked.
JUNE 2019 EVALUATIONENGINEERING.COM

7
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Evaluation Engineering

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