Virtual machines and automated test equipment

Supporting legacy automated test equipment (ATE) has always been a challenge while also maintaining configuration control. Often, it is the computer that fails before any other instrumentation or circuitry. With the rapid changes in computing technology, both hardware and software, it can be particularly difficult to replace the computer in a legacy test system. Likewise, it can be challenging to maintain configuration control on a released test system for production when additional capability is required and development is being performed on the production system. This paper examines the capabilities and limitations of the use of virtual machines to mitigate the issues surrounding support of legacy ATE as well its application to future development on production test systems. In the author's experimentation, communication with GPIB, LAN, and PXI instruments was considered. Furthermore, a test case was developed in which a virtual machine of a legacy tester computer was created and tested with the existing ATE instrumentation. Additionally, virtual machines were considered for use as a configuration management tool during tester development and after a tester is released to production.