Tektronix Streamlines Compliance Testing with NI TestStand
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Using the open NI TestStand platform, Tektronix developed a custom user interface with a Tektronix look and feel.
Author(s):
Jit Lim - Tektronix Inc.
Industry:
ATE/Instrumentation
Products:
TestStand
The Challenge:
Designing a framework for compliance testing that reduces complexity and testing time.
The Solution:
Using NI TestStand, Tektronix developed a scalable compliance test solution that can support multiple standards and reduce complexity as well as test time.
"By using NI TestStand, Tektronix reduced compliance test time by approximately 70 percent."
Many new serial data bus architectures such as PCI Express, XAUI, RapidIO, HDMI, and SATA provide significantly greater data throughput than was possible only a few years ago. With countless products incorporating these new buses, design engineers must implement and validate these high-speed serial buses in their designs. To facilitate compliance testing for current and future serial bus architectures, Tektronix developed the TekExpress compliance test automation framework. The TekExpress framework provides software tools to develop and automate the hundreds of tests necessary to certify a product for different serial bus standards. Using the TekExpress framework, Tektronix developed the TekExpress SATA automated compliance test software that automates 100 percent of the required SATA Gen1/Gen2 compliance tests using the Tektronix serial data test bench.
Building the TekExpress Framework
Tektronix required a test executive for the TekExpress framework that could support multiple instruments, future standards, and a variety of buses as well as satisfy the execution performance requirements needed to reduce compliance test time. Although Tektronix considered off-the-shelf and custom test executives, the company selected NI TestStand test management software because it provides an open and flexible platform to meet these requirements. Using NI TestStand, the TekExpress development team created a set of control libraries to facilitate communication between the TekExpress framework and multiple instruments. With these control libraries, engineers working with the TekExpress framework can control instrumentation without knowing the specific communication and analysis functionality for each instrument. They use the control libraries in a TekExpress compliance test automation script, which tests each unit for compliance under a particular standard. Both control libraries and test automation scripts are implemented as NI TestStand sequences. By using NI TestStand to execute the test automation scripts, Tektronix reduced compliance test time by approximately 70 percent for the TekExpress serial ATA compliance test solution.
The TekExpress compliance test automation framework also provides a user interface built on .NET that controls the test system. Using the open NI TestStand platform, Tektronix developed a custom user interface with a Tektronix look and feel. The user interface communicates with the NI TestStand execution engine using the NI TestStand API to run the compliance test automation script and update the user interface with the TekExpress system status. A TekExpress system can also be controlled by a second automated test system using the open API exposed by TekExpress. Using this API, test systems written in NI TestStand, the NI LabVIEW graphical development environment, or any programming language that can communicate with DLLs can control a TekExpress system and integrate it into a larger automated test system.
Future Opportunities
In the future, the TekExpress framework will use many of the software tools developed for NI TestStand. TekExpress systems will also integrate with tools for data management, requirements traceability, device characterization, and many others.
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