Facing the test challenges of a new generation of digital mobile standards - EDA365电子工程师网

Sigi Gross12/1/2010 1:06 AM EST

You can look at digital electronic product development as a never-ending, stress-inducing struggle, or you can look at it as a constantly evolving opportunity to win new business. As newtechnologies emerge, they enable you to add new functions and features to your products. Those new functions and features create new demand, which in turn stimulates the development of new technologies.

To succeed in the marketplace, each evolution of your product has to be faster and more affordable. You might need to raise the resolution, add more memory and incorporate a higher-speed memory bus.

Yet you have to squeeze all this added functionality into a smaller package, and it must use less power. You cannot overlook product quality or reliability, and you cannot pause to catch your breath or your competitors will eat your lunch.

But overcoming all those challenges is only half the battle. As every digital device developer knows, the other critical element is making sure your products pass the certification tests that ensure they are compliant with the latest digital standards.

A tremendous amount of change is occurring now in the electronics industry as the traditional computer ecosystem converges with the mobile telephony world and the consumer electronics world converges with the PC world.

Currently, the PC industry produces devices with high performance, and the mobile industry produces devices with low power consumption. As the industries converge, the PC industry is seeking to reduce its devices' power consumption and the mobile industry is working to boost the performance of its products.

Many digital standards are being revised to enable these changes. In addition to HDMI 1.4 and 3.0 versions of the PCI Express, USB and SATA standards, we expect to see a new generation of flash module specifications that have the potential to restructure the entire market. Additional standards that define the interconnection between chips in a mobile phone are being driven by the MIPI organization. These standards include MIPI D-Phy, MIPIM-Phy, DigRFv3 and DigRFv4.

These new and revised standards offer speed improvements, better power management, and a host of new features that will ratchet up the competition among device manufacturers who want to deliver innovative products for the emerging "mobile computing" world (Table 1 below).

Table 1: Status and benefits of the current crop of new standards. (To view larger image,click here)

Why standards are important

The primary role of standards, of course, is to enable interoperability. If you purchase a Blu-ray player from Sony, an HDMI cable from 3M and a TV from Philips, you expect them to work together when you plug them in. Interoperability requires a framework that is defined by criteria like jitter tolerance and receiver sensitivity. If your products comply with the framework, they can be certified to the standard. If all companies adhere to the standard, their components are interoperable.

Standards also allow many companies to work together, and they drive competition in the market. When robust standards are in place, companies can focus on a single product instead of having to build an entire system, so smaller companies can compete.

You can build just a DVD player instead of having to build the DVD player and the television it works with. You can use chips and components built by other companies instead of developing your own, which speeds development, drives down costs and increases profitability.

Without standards, consumers would be locked into buying their equipment from the company that originates each technology. Innovation would be stifled, prices would remain high, and only the affluent would be able to afford the latest technology.

The role of test and measurement companies

Test and measurement companies like Agilent are important to the process of establishing standards. We use our expertise to support the standards organizations in figuring out how to accurately characterize new interfaces and devices. For example, we contributed to the HDMI Compliance Test Specification (CTS) and provided input to the HDMI Consortium, the standardization body for HDMI.

Some of the technologies used in the newest standards, especially microwave signaling technology, have been used in advanced instrumentation for decades: our test and measurement design expertise allows us to offer critical guidance to help standards bodies create successful standards. Active participation in standards development takes a whole different level of commitment and expertise than merely selling test instruments.

Test and measurement companies play another vital role as well: Without the right tools and expertise, design engineers working with emerging technologies would not be able to characterize their components and devices according to the standards to ensure their components are interoperable.

Not only do we supply the tools, but in many cases, we also help engineers with the methodology for conducting their tests. Doing this well requires measurement application knowledge and a combination of test fixtures and measurement hardware and software that work together to form a complete solution.

Agilent is a contributing member of several standards committees, including JEDEC, PCI-SIG, USB-IF, VESA, SATA-IO, MIPI, SDA and OIF, and our employees serve on the boards of several of these organizations (PCI-SIG, JEDEC and VESA).

As the newest-generation digital standards are finalized and companies begin developing compliant products, their engineering teams will face huge technical challenges. As the need for low power intensifies, data rates are going up, and we are reaching the limits of today's board materials(FR4).

Smaller packages make it more difficult to get access to test points, which makes de-embedding essential. As speeds increase, digital engineers have to become familiar with microwave effects like reflections and crosstalk that are common in the RF world. More-complex protocols will further complicate the design engineer's job.

The good news? This new generation of standards will enable significant increases in performance that will pave the way for the mobile computing revolution. And Agilent is ready with the required test and measurement tools to help engineers conquer the challenges and speed their new devices to market.

Siegfried Gross ( F7 a! b( [9 }. V- ^, v
is Vice President and General Manager, Digital Test Division, Electronic Measurement Group,Agilent Technologies. After leaving the university in 1984, Siegfried Gross joined Agilent Technologies (formerly Hewlett-Packard) as a research and development (R&D) engineer to work for the Optical Measurement Division where he was instrumental in creating Agilent's new Remote Management & Diagnostics business and in innovating Bit Error Rate measurements with the Parallel Bit Error Ratio Tester (ParBERT) in 1998. He holds a degree in electronic design from the Berufsakademie Stuttgart and worked for five years as guest professor at that institute, teaching analog circuit design.