National Instruments releases 2011 automated test outlook

BANGALORE, INDIA: National Instruments has released its 2011 Automated Test Outlook report, which shares findings of the company’s research into the technologies and methodologies shaping test and measurement.

The report details trends that apply across numerous industries including consumer electronics, automotive, semiconductor, aerospace and defense, medical devices and communications. With insight from the report, engineers and managers can take advantage of the latest strategies and best practices for optimizing any test organization.

The 2011 Automated Test Outlook is based on input from academic and industry research, user forums and surveys, business intelligence and customer advisory board reviews. With this data as its foundation, the report delivers a broad representation of the next generation of trends for meeting the business and technical challenges in test and measurement. The report is organized into five categories: Business Strategy, Architectures, Computing, Software and I/O. The major trends discussed in the 2011 report include the following:

Organizational Test Integration: Integrating validation and production test requires a focus on changes to strategy, processes, people and technology.

System Software Stack: A highly integrated software framework provides a flexible system architecture for adding measurement capability and reducing test time.

Heterogeneous Computing: Future test systems will require different types of processing nodes to address increasingly demanding analysis and processing needs.

IP to the Pin: Sharing field-programmable gate array (FPGA) intellectual property (IP) between design and test dramatically shortens design verification/validation and improves production test time and fault coverage.