Telecom And Wireless Drive Performance
For decades, Test and Measurement (T&M) has shouldered the burden of a broad range of diverse and complex tasks in the life of every electronic product—from its beginnings in the design stage, into the production test environment, and on to after-market support like test diagnostics, alignment, and repair.
As we enter 2002, T&M can be thought of as a confluence of many rivers—higher performance, diminution in the physical size of devices and products, ascendancy of wireless, and the growing presence of the PC in instrumentation. All of these tributaries converge in one enormous deluge, flooding the already swollen river known as T&M.
We had better not forget optical products and their steady growth. As far as we can see for now, they offer the ultimate in bandwidth for moving information, and the pressures are extreme. Mobile traffic is reported to have grown 77% in the past year alone. These issues all demand that T&M pedal a little faster.
The breadth of instrument types is growing, but the bread-and-butter stalwarts are still the familiar ones. The oscilloscopes, logic and protocol analyzers, and automatic test equipment (ATE) are in the vanguard.
We will observe a continuing push to bring real-time oscilloscopes up to the same bandwidths and sampling rates now available in sampling oscilloscopes. As for ATE systems, these veritable 800-pound gorillas still guard the exits from the manufacturing floors, making sure that only the good stuff—chips, boards, and fully assembled products—are packaged and shipped. Here too, developing trends will change their roles.
Wireless, packaging, and particularly the continual shrinking of products, boards, and devices all call upon T&M to stay abreast or end up left behind. So what can we expect to see emerging in the balance of this year?
Though marketing managers are tight-lipped when queried about how much this or that parameter of an oscilloscope, logic analyzer, and the like will improve this year, unmistakable clues indicate what's coming. A number of products will be announced, following in stride many of the trends identified below.
Numerous events are converging at the chip level. Following almost in lock-step with the relentless shrinking of geometries tooled in silicon, supply voltages are in the low single digits and will probably descend into the millivolt range. As for currents, the picoampere (1012 ampere) will be supplanted by the femptoampere (1015), which may give way to the attoampere (1018). Such infinitesimal currents, with their unfamiliar names, will soon roll off our tongues as easily as "microampere" does today. Fifty years ago, we never would have imagined ever confronting such incredibly small values. But Moore's law is remorseful and ubiquitous.
On the silicon itself, there will be increasing demands on chip designers to build in self-tests along the lines of IEEE 1149.4. This is the analog version of an earlier specification, IEEE 1149.1.
Packages are becoming smaller too. Surface-mount technology (SMT), flip chips, and the use of extraordinarily small discretes are all increasing. Together they're changing the way that manufacturing and test engineers view T&M, particularly regarding the continued use of in-circuit testing.
Due to the current recession, cost efficiency, rather than faster, broader, and deeper, is demanded. To drive costs out of manufacturing, T&M must play a major role. In the past, the thrust was adding capacity and bandwidth. Now, the drive is to lower network costs. Today the issues zero in on reduced cost per test, reduced setup time, and increased throughput, and all are becoming more crucial than ever.
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