Benefits of universal switching in ATE: Exploring the benefits of COTS Universal Switching solutions

The commercial offerings in ATE over the last 20-30 years has shown a strong disparity between COTS solutions available to the integrator vs the solutions offered by the large turnkey ATE manufacturers. This disparity is primarily focused in the area of switching. For the system integrators, the choice has been a wide variety of switching products, primarily in formats such as VXI or more recently PXI. These offerings are various unrelated switches in Matrix, Tree and SPDT or SPST formats. There has been minimal effort among the card providers to offer a set of cards which work together to create a unified switching system. The Turnkey system providers on the other hand have primarily focused on providing systems with highly integrated Universal Switching architectures. The reason for the disparity is puzzling as the Turnkey system providers clearly see strong advantage in the Universal Switching Architecture, strong enough to spend significant resources in developing a proprietary switching system of their own. Surprisingly, the commercial card providers have not jumped onto this bandwagon and developed commercial alternatives for System Integrators until recently. Recently we have been spending time with more customers wrestling with Legacy ATE challenges. It has been our experience that Universal Switching can be both a way forward as well as providing a future platform more suited for TPS transportability. This paper will explore both the functionality as well as the merits of Universal Switching systems in an effort to help the reader make an informed decision. Considering that the fielding of any group of TPS's on a system platform frequently exceeds the cost of the Test System itself, sometimes to a large degree, the ability to reduce the cost of the TPS development as well as future transition to a next generation system is a significant driver in the reduction of the overall cost of ownership of the program. We will also explore how Universal Switching can be used to replace non-Universal Switching in fielded ATE Systems, and how it more readily supports new technology insertions and creates a next generation test platform which more readily supports TPS transportability across platforms.