Test / Data Acq.
Vision Software Takes Two Paths |
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Wednesday, 24 January 2007 |
Code libraries and high-level programs simplify the development of vision inspection applications. Cameras, lights, and computers may be the mainstays of machine-vision systems, but it’s the software that does the work. As a result, software development plays a key role in the creation of vision or inspection systems. Most engineers tackle the development of vision software in one of two ways. The two approaches differ only in how far engineers remove themselves from software details and how much control over the software they want. In both cases, engineers rely on vendors to provide algorithms that match patterns, find edges, measure image features, and perform other key functions....more  (0) Comments |
Testing At 65nm: Are You Feeling Lucky? |
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Tuesday, 23 January 2007 |
Chip design is not an activity for the faint of heart. Nowhere is the question of risk versus reward more potent than in the areas of test and yield. New geometries create a seemingly no-win decision for designers. Faced with the choice of extreme risk in terms of inadequate coverage, high test costs and schedule slips, versus the equally anxiety-producing decision to adopt new tools, technologies and processes, chip designers must increasingly ask themselves, “Am I feeling lucky today?”
But the semiconductor industry has never been a game of pure luck, decided by a roll of the dice. Test costs are rising and the risk of failure at the newest feature generations is greater than ever. At 90nm nodes and below, device failure modes now are dominated by performance and signal integrity issues, in addition to more familiar defect mechanisms. Although the test methodologies of the past have served the industry well, they are now falling short in screening for these new failure mechanisms. While change is always seen as risky, providing more of the same test is a gamble that design managers can not afford....more (0) Comments |
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Emerson Introduces Free Online Training On Wireless Technologies |
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Friday, 19 January 2007 |
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Emerson's PlantWeb University broadens its Internet Engineering School with 19 new courses about using wireless technology in process automation. At www.PlantWebUniversity.com, users can select from a broad range of free online courses — including 19 new courses on using wireless technology in process manufacturing operations. Emerson Process Management is offering 19 new online training courses on various aspects of wireless for process automation. Designed for anyone who uses automation to improve plant performance, the new courses are available free through Emerson's educational website....more SMF Discussbot Error:Invalid Default Board |
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High Performance Data Acquisition On The USB |
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Friday, 19 January 2007 |
A common belief among engineers is that, to get the best performance, a PCbased
data acquisition module must plug into the PCI bus. Properly implemented, however, a data acquisition module can use the PC’s USB 2.0 port to pump data into a PC as fast as PCI-based cards. The keys to achieving this performance are a hardware USB interface on the module and optimized driver software for the host system.
The Simultaneous Series of modules offer up to 2.0MHz sampling rates on USB 2.0.
Because the Universal Serial Bus (USB) was originally developed to replace lowspeed peripheral cabling, many engineers fail to see its potential as a high performance data acquisition channel. The original USB specification did offer only a modest bit rate, but USB 2.0 handles 480 Mbits/sec, fast enough to handle 60 Mbyte/sec data streams. Even with the protocol reserving some bandwidth for interrupts and control transfers, and the header overhead on data packets, the bus can easily sustain more than 10 Mbytes/sec of continual data transfer. This is fast enough to support extremely high performance data acquisition (DAQ) hardware....more (0) Comments |
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PXI And Synthetic Instrumentation |
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Tuesday, 16 January 2007 |
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What is synthetic instrumentation? Think of it as a versatile hardware black box where software programs are used to interpret input signals and generate output signals according to a user-selected function. The logic behind synthetic instrumentation is to derive more functionality from a given hardware unit. You can define that functionality as more value from a single hardware investment, or as more utility within a limited footprint....more (0) Comments |
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Tuesday, 09 January 2007 |
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A displacement or error referenced to a signal’s ideal timing is called jitter. For example, if the positive-going edges of a clock signal are used as the timing reference for a digital circuit, then any deviation of the actual clock edges from their ideal positions constitutes jitter. The reason for interest in jitter is because, at a sufficiently high level, it makes circuits fail. If a communications link, for example, must operate with only one error in 1012 b, a common specification, then the total jitter must be less than the amount of jitter corresponding to a 10-12 bit error rate (BER). “[As speeds increase,] the margin between what the silicon actually is doing [such as in a high-speed communications chip] and the required specification is shrinking,” commented Steve Lomaro, business development manager at Verigy. “This has forced jitter measurements to the forefront, both in design validation and production testing.”...more (0) Comments |
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