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www.us-
tech.com Customizing COTS Test Systems Continued from page 61
bers to simulate the worst case com- ponent environments. The accelera- tor pedals are mechanically cycled 24 hours a day for up to several months while the data acquisition system records the position and monitors the motion profile to ensure the pedal is performing as designed.
In some
instances, stress is also measured on the component under test. The original ATE system devel-
oped for this purpose as a custom solution was a proprietary non-stan- dards based system no longer sup- ported by its manufacturer. Later, the system was updated with VXI components from KineticSystems, but was still largely proprietary. “Every time they purchased a
new system they made incremental improvements, but never came up with a standardized solution they could easily duplicate,” says Krebs. “Now they were interested in a more economical solution that took less real estate and that they could stan- dardize globally.”
Upgrading the company’s data acquisition system
called for far more than just a backplane stuffed with COTS PXI cards.
KineticSystems was able to sat-
isfy the requirements with a PXI- based solution. The company sup- plied 4 modular off-the-shelf instru- ments
(KineticSystems Model
#CP246) in rack mounted enclosure. Each CP246 is a flexible 8-channel CompactPCI/PXI module with signal
To meet the needs of a specific application, instrument makers are often asked to semi-customize hardware, software, and firmware elements.
urable data acquisition software, SoftView, which provides access to all of an instrument’s capabilities and features through a simple point- and-click GUI.
Laser Instrument Systems There are several advantages of
purchasing COTS modules: reduce costs, faster time-to-market and allow a company to focus its abilities on the design of the complete meas- urement system and not be con- cerned with test instrument manu- facturing. This was the case for a U.S.
manufacturer of laser instrument systems for specialized inspection at electrical and geological sites. The manufacturer had been dedicating
were available at the time the prod- uct was initially created, FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays) that perform on board signal process- ing on a COTS digitizer were not. Later, when the product started
to take off, the manufacturer decided to incorporate an off-the-shelf digitiz- er into its system. GaGe, a manufac- turer of high-speed PCI/PCIe digitiz- ers, had just released one of the industries’ first digitizers with FPGA programmability that performed many of the functions in firmware processing that the manufacturer required. After some research, the laser manufacturer selected a 12-bit high-speed digitizer from GaGe. Almost immediately, it was clear that the FPGA was not large
conditioning and ADC. The customer also required the
ATE to have the built-in flexibility to perform ad-hoc data acquisition experimentation without having to write any code. This was achieved through KineticSystems’ config-
valuable resources to engineering its own digitizer card in house, which was expensive and time-consuming and distracted personnel from the company’s core competence — the laser optical system itself. Although commercial digitizers
December, 2011
enough for the application, so GaGe worked with the customer to add another, larger FPGA. The larger FPGA was from the same FPGA fam- ily and was pin compatible with the original. Consequently, GaGe was able to enlarge the FPGA without changing the circuit board, which would have entailed much higher costs.
The manufacturer then realized
belatedly that the digitizer they had developed in house was also equipped with low-speed A/D, D/A, I/O to capture analog temperature measurements, activate motors, and turn the various devices on and off. To add these elements, GaGe
partnered with KineticSystems to deliver what became a 2-board solu- tion — the digitizer and a PXI DAQ data acquisition board from KineticSystems modified to operate from a USB port that provided the additional functions.
EM Compliance Systems In another example from GaGe,
a US manufacturer of electromagnet- ic (EM) compliance systems required an 8-bit high-speed digitizer. However, the customer required more memory than currently avail- able on even the largest of GaGe’s digitizers. This was an extraordi- nary requirement as GaGe offers some of the highest on-board memo- ry in the industry, up to 4GS/s. But the customer still needed more. GaGe met the requirement with
a two-card solution, with each card’s memory designed to fill in succes- sion. Due to timing delays between cards, a special triggering signal was added to activate the second card when the first card was full. GaGe provided a procedure to figure out the delay between the two cards and
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