The File - Sep 1, 2008 - (Page 1)

India’s fortnightly focus on electronics design September 1-15, 2008 Emerging trends require new test tools By Jayaram Pillai Managing Director IndRA (India, Russia & Arabia) National Instruments Corp. Test engineers in industries ranging from aerospace and defence to consumer electronics are facing the challenge of testing increasingly complicated designs with shrinking timelines and budgets. To address these issues, engineers and scientists are incorporating new test and measurement technologies that are capable of meeting complex design requirements without raising costs. These include PXI, FPGAs and multi-core processors to develop highperformance test systems that can meet consumer demand for higher-quality products. Fortunately, more technology vendors are developing industry- standard tools capable of solving problems that previously depended on expensive, dedicated test systems. We believe that certain trends will significantly influence the test and measure- Pillai: By bridging the worlds of design and test and the traditional phases of product development, advanced tools can help engineers increase their productivity as they address future challenges. ment industry over the next three years. The first is the increased use of multi-core/parallel test systems. To continue realising performance gains without increased clock rates, processor manufacturers are developing processors with multiple cores on a single chip. With multi-core processors, test engineers can develop automated test applications capable of achieving the highest possible throughput through parallel processing. To enable parallel processing, engineers traditionally had to learn complex constructs such as threading libraries and mutexes to achieve parallel programming in a text-based programming language. Using graphical data flow programming software, engineers immediately benefit from multi-core processors because the language is inherently parallel and can automatically scale user applications based on the total available number of cores. Another trend is the growth of software-defined instrumentation. One issue facing test engineers is that test instrumentation is not updated as rapidly as the devices being tested. This is increasingly challenging for many test engineers. Thus, they are turning to a software-defined approach to instrumentation that gives them the ability to quickly customise their equipment and user interfaces to meet specific application needs and integrate testing directly into the design process, further reducing development time. PXI is an example of a widely used software-defined instrumentation standard for building modular, continued on page Examine issues in serial bus debug By Zubin Mohta Application Engineer Tektronix India Inside In Focus 4 8 Get the low down on IEEE 1588 clock synchronisation Combine techniques to reduce ICT cost, complexity Embedded systems are literally everywhere in our society today. A simple definition of an embedded system is a special-purpose computer system that is part of a larger system or machine with the intended purpose of providing monitoring and control services to that system or machine. The typical embedded system starts running some special-purpose application as soon as it is turned on and will not stop until it is turned off. Virtually every electronic device designed and produced today is an embedded system. Embedded systems can contain many dif ferent types of devices, including microprocessors, MCUs, DSPs, RAM, EPROMs, FPGAs, ADCs, DACs and I/O. These various devices have tra- ditionally communicated with each other and the outside world using wide parallel buses. Today, however, more and more of the building blocks used in embedded system design are replacing these wide parallel buses with serial buses for the following reasons: • Less board space required due to fewer signals to route; • Lower cost; • Lower power requirements; • Fewer pins on packages; • Embedded clocks; • Differential signalling for better noise immunity; continued on page Community 12 SME, educational programmes show how NI cares Sponsors 2 5 7 9 11 13 National Semiconductor Tech Insights DigiKey Microchip Technology National Instruments Texas Instruments www.eetindia.com http://www.eetindia.co.in/STATIC/REDIRECT/Newsletter_080901_GS01.htm http://www.eetindia.co.in/SEARCH/SUMMARY/technical-articles/fpga.HTM?ClickFromNewsletter_080901 http://www.eetindia.co.in/SEARCH/SUMMARY/technical-articles/DAC.HTM?ClickFromNewsletter_080901 http://www.eetindia.co.in/SEARCH/SUMMARY/technical-articles/DAC.HTM?ClickFromNewsletter_080816 http://www.eetindia.co.in/STATIC/REDIRECT/Newsletter_080901_GS01.htm http://www.eetindia.co.in/STATIC/REDIRECT/Newsletter_080901_EETI02.htm

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of The File - Sep 1, 2008

EETimes India - September 1-15, 2008
Contents
National Semiconductor
Get the Low Down on IEEE 1588 Clock Synchronisation
Tech Insights
DigiKey
Combine Techniques to Reduce ICT Cost, Complexity
Microchip Technology
National Instruments
SME, Educational Programmers Show How NI�Cares
Texas Instruments

The File - Sep 1, 2008