Bridging Technology to Mitigate ATS Instrument Obsolescence

The VXIbus (IEEE-STD-1155) was the first widely adopted modular standard in the test and measurement industry. The adoption of the VXIbus standard led the way for the industry system integrators to achieve tremendous reductions in instrument size, ATS footprint, power consumption, cooling and overall cost. Automated Test Systems (ATS) designed and delivered for more than the last 20 years were fielded with a high percentage of VXI instrumentation. During that same time period, the test and measurement industry developed their new product lines leveraging advanced technologies from the PC industries leaving very limited resources to contend with product supportability issues for their VXI instruments. Unfortunately, as the VXIbus standard and its instrument support declines, system sustainment challenges grow exponentially. Today the VXI user's ability to maintain and support their ATS inventory is being challenged. With the large sums of money that have been invested in the ATS and TPS, to support operational objectives, the using organizations must deal with this evolving support problem. User organizations are experiencing lifetime management struggles to mitigate the impacts to their capabilities caused by critical vendors obsoleting VXI instruments and ending their support. The removal of VXIbus instrumentation increases risk impact to the ATS system dramatically since most ATS systems were principally fielded utilizing VXIbus instruments. The ratio of the VXIbus architecture instrumentation as compared to the total number of instruments in the test system is high. This ratio, in effect, amplifies the risk to the system due to obsolescence. Sustainment solutions to facilitate integrating merging industry standards seamlessly with the VXI standard can ease the transition impact by relegating the scope of a change to the INSTRUMENT level and away from the STANDARD level risk impact. In the case of VXI to PXI, or VXI to PXIe, a bridge technology that can identify and provide a path to resolve the impact to the instrument level will allow the ATS managers to accurately plan costs and manage risk while sustaining operational capability.