Pin Electronics for Instrumentation and Automated Test Equipment: Challenges and Solutions

This work discusses the challenges in developing pin electronics for instrumentation and automated test equipment and introduces first, a highly integrated pin electronics (PE) System-on-Chip (SOC) and, second, a Peripheral Component Interface extension for Instrumentation Express (PXI(e) card based on the presented PE SOC, as solutions. The presented SOC realizes the key PE analog functions of a 4-quadrant per pin parametric measurement unit (PPMU), dual-mode 3-level driver, comparator, active load, per-pin timing deskew. These functions, along with digital support circuitry, realize 8 independent mixed-signal pin channels. The PE SOC enables the modular, 64-channel PXI(e) card presented in this work which has 2 to 4 times the spatial density, speed and memory of existing instruments with the same power and footprint. From an application perspective, the presented PE SOC and PXI(e) card enable testing of leading-edge high pin- count AI, communications, EV and automotive parts. Moreover, the modular design of the presented PXI(e) cards allows for flexibility to expand the design as the market needs require.