Test and measurement must have a broader outlook
The industry must align closer to the commercial technologies being developed in the broader industries it serves, National Instruments’ Director of Product Marketing for Modular Instruments, PXI and Instrument Control Eric Starkloff told Frost & Sullivans’ S. Vidyasankar.
Interviewed by the analyst firm, Starkloff said that the test and measuremente industry has a long history of innovation, with pioneers like HP and Tektronix that invented the foundation of today’s industries such as video displays and monitoring.
“The role of innovation in test and measurement has changed, however. The innovation will come in the way in which we deploy this standard technology to solve our customer’s challenges. For example, software-defined architectures that use PC processors and FPGAs will increase the performance of measurement systems and give test engineers the ability to rapidly reconfigure test systems to meet their changing test requirements,” he said.
Starkloff found three major trends in the test and measurement industry:
-Test engineers are turning to a software-defined approach to instrumentation which gives them the ability to quickly customise their measurement algorithms and user interfaces to meet specific application needs.
-The increase in system-level tools for field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), powerful because the are inherently parallel, deterministic, and reliable and can be defined and reconfigured in software.
-The explosion of wireless technology.
The full interview can be found here.