The fourth ElectroTest Expo is taking place on Tuesday 26th March at the Rose (Ageas) Bowl in Southampton.
The exhibition and seminar sessions focus on PCB debug and test technologies and is organised by a group of test and measurement and ATE companies including National Instruments, Pickering, Tektronix, JTAG Technologies, Pico Technology and Amfax.
The free-to-attend event aims to cover a wide variety of aspects of test and measurement, from the modular instrumentation platforms used for building systems to the software that is used to develop, sequence and run test code modules.
Seminars
A key topic for National Instruments at the event's seminar programme is role FPGA-based systems have in processing and analysis within test systems.
For example, Jeremy Twaits, the Automated Test Product Manager at National Instruments will be presenting on the trend towards heterogeneous computing within test systems, and he will discuss how FPGAs have given rise to "software-designed" instruments, which are fully user-customisable because the firmware is determined by a personality deployed to an on-board FPGA.
"By tweaking and editing the deployed code, an engineer can design the exact instrument functionality they need, by adding additional signal processing, custom triggering schemes or even new communication protocols," said Twaits.
The company will demonstrate its first software-designed instrument, the Vector Signal Transceiver, as well as further examples of modular instrumentation based upon the PXI platform.
James Stanbridge from JTAG Technologies will describe the features and benefits of using boundary scan test.
"Even though JTAG boundary scan has been established as an IEEE standard for over 20 years there still remains a thirst for information about this board test method," said Stanbridge.
Nick Hickford from Pickering Interfaces believes there can be benefits from using LXI and USB communications interfaces in conjunction with PXI-based test systems. "This can improve overall system flexibility and the cost effectiveness," said Hickford.
Derek Maclachlan from Tektronix will present a paper describing how test methods can optimised to address the different wireless protocols and frequencies in use around the world.
A3DI is a new concept in the inspection of surface mount device and BGAs and Dave Hall from Amfax will describe the technique which uses laser profiling and patented BGA inspection in production test and reworking.
Stuart Murlis from Pico Technology will describe how USB oscilloscopes can offer an affordable approach to measuring high-speed circuits. Victor Fernades of Geotest will highlight the importance of integrating software into the test environment.
Exhibition
The event will present users with an opportunity to see recently introduced test systems from a number of suppliers.
Tektronix will demonstrate its MDO4000 series of mixed domain oscilloscopes which now includes two new entry level models. Combining the capabilities of an oscilloscope and spectrum analyser, the instruments can capture time-correlated analogue, digital and RF signals.
The new MDO4014-3 and MDO4034-3 models offer four analogue channels, 16 digital channels and one RF channel. With prices starting at £8,110, the new models offer lower analogue bandwidth of 100MHz or 350MHz respectively.
