Instrument design that solves the challenges of both legacy and emerging test requirements

In addition to designing an automatic test system (ATS) that meets a customer's current and emerging test requirements, many system integrators must also meet the challenge of creating a system that maintains a customer's investment in existing test program sets (TPSs). Meeting this challenge is difficult because most COTS test instruments are not designed with legacy requirements in mind. Rather, they are designed to meet current test requirements with an eye toward anticipating future requirements. Instruments designed to meet legacy requirements typically do not have much capability to address emerging requirements because the design focus is on emulating previous instrument capabilities and behaviors as exactly as possible. Test instrument manufacturers can help system integrators overcome this challenge by designing instruments that meet the challenges of both legacy and emerging test requirements. While new technology such as FPGAs and advanced DSP can go a long way toward helping the designer meet both challenges, creating an instrument that successfully matches both sets of requirements requires great care in applying the technology to achieve a high degree of flexibility. This paper starts with a discussion of why a design for flexibility approach is so important to the instrument vendor, the ATS integrator, and the end customer. The paper concludes with design guidance and examples illustrating the success of such an approach.