30 Years of Test & Measurement

Tuesday, August 01 2006 “In a nutshell,” said Wolfgang Schmittseifer, CEO of Rohde & Schwarz, “the personal computer completely changed test equipment of all kinds. Not only the way test equipment is designed and manufactured, but the way users interact with it, and the number of measurements it can perform have been vastly improved thanks to the PC,” he explained. “This technology enables cost-effective, compact, powerful instruments to be created that simply could not be realized otherwise.”

Virtual Instruments
Over the past 30 years, a change in the science of measurement has happened with the migration from analog to digital instrumentation. According to Martyn Etherington, vice president of worldwide marketing for Tektronix, “We have seen countless electronic applications migrate from analog to digital implementations — including voice, data, video, RF communications, and oscilloscopes. We have seen digital signaling speeds migrate from slow speeds where signal paths behaved as simple lumped circuits, to faster speeds where the signal paths are transmission lines, to blinding speeds where signal paths are loss-constrained electrical and optical transmission lines.”

“Clearly, microprocessors have become ubiquitous inside measuring instruments, moving instruments from purely analog to primarily digital in nature,” said Brad Byrum, general manager of Yokogawa Corporation of America. That, in turn, he said, has “improved measurement stability, analytical processing power, data presentation, as well as data communication interfaces.”

Said Loofie Gutterman, CEO of Geotest, “The biggest change has probably been the evolution of card modular instrumentation. Thirty years ago, almost all instrumentation was in a box. The desire for more compact instrumentation, coupled with an increasing interest to tie automation to test and measurement functionality, helped fuel the interest in modular instrumentation.”

“Clearly, microprocessors have become ubiquitous inside measuring instruments, moving instruments from purely analog to primarily digital in nature,” said Brad Byrum, general manager of Yokogawa Corporation of America. That, in turn, he said, has “improved measurement stability, analytical processing power, data presentation, as well as data communication interfaces.”

Said Loofie Gutterman, CEO of Geotest, “The biggest change has probably been the evolution of card modular instrumentation. Thirty years ago, almost all instrumentation was in a box. The desire for more compact instrumentation, coupled with an increasing interest to tie automation to test and measurement functionality, helped fuel the interest in modular instrumentation.”

As new buses, or interfaces, became available for PC-based measurement and control, modular card — or virtual — instruments became more popular. According to Gutterman, “Early-generation products in the late 1980s took advantage of the PC’s ISA bus, with later generation products transitioning to PCI. Today, over 80% of our product revenue can be attributed to products that are based on PC standards — specifically PCI and PXI instrumentation, software, and systems.”

Today, PCs, Web access, USB connectivity, and local area networks (LANs) are commonly used in test applications. “Rather than invent everything ourselves, as we often did in the 1980s, test and measurement manufacturers have learned to leverage the price and volume advantages of computer components, bus structures, and display technologies,” said Stratton. “This shift in thinking lets us focus on what we do best — the measurement science of signal acquisition, generation, and calibration.”

“The PC has clearly established its role as the most important computing element in our society,” stated Truchard. “This power is available for building virtual instrumentation. Along with that, very high-performan2F>

As new buses, or interfaces, became available for PC-based measurement and control, modular card — or virtual — instruments became more popular. According to Gutterman, “Early-generation products in the late 1980s took advantage of the PC’s ISA bus, with later generation products transitioning to PCI. Today, over 80% of our product revenue can be attributed to products that are based on PC standards — specifically PCI and PXI instrumentation, software, and systems.”

Today, PCs, Web access, USB connectivity, and local area networks (LANs) are commonly used in test applications. “Rather than invent everything ourselves, as we often did in the 1980s, test and measurement manufacturers have learned to leverage the price and volume advantages of computer components, bus structures, and display technologies,” said Stratton. “This shift in thinking lets us focus on what we do best — the measurement science of signal acquisition, generation, and calibration.”

“The PC has clearly established its role as the most important computing element in our society,” stated Truchard. “This power is available for building virtual instrumentation. Along with that, very high-performance analog to digital and digital to analog converter technologies used in communications applications have made it possible to build very powerful measurement capabilities to work with PC technology, and this technology now exceeds that of traditional instrumentation.”