Trends in Test Part 4 – Breaking down 'The Wall' between design and test
11 August 2010
In this five-part series, National Instruments draws upon its knowledge and experience of a wide range of industries to identify key technologies impacting test and measurement in 2010. This penultimate instalment focuses on integrating design and test.
Embedded systems and devices are improving the quality of life of consumers. Smart phones can bring a wealth of information to our fingertips, robots can perform brain surgery and vacuum cleaners can automatically navigate and clean your house. But as these devices become more commonplace and complex, engineers are facing significant challenges to streamline the design and test process.
The embedded design and test process typically consists of various forms of design simulation, validation, verification and system test. Across these phases, there is often a hard transition between software tools, forcing the lengthy process of rewriting and stitching together of code as this ‘wall’ is crossed. This often detrimentally impacts margins, time-to-market, engineering time and documentation.
To counteract this, there is a growing trend towards the reuse of tools and simulation data across the complete development process, facilitating significant increases in efficiency. The same high-level graphical software tools can be used to develop a device, using models, real-world data, simulations and COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) prototyping hardware. This same intellectual property (IP) can be reused on real-time test hardware, eliminating the need to switch between tools, taking the ‘wall’ out of the equation.
Dedicated real-time test software, like NI VeriStand, also offers the ability to reuse existing tasks across the entire embedded design flow, improving continuity from system definition right through to final system test. For example, when developing embedded control software, the stimulus profiles and analysis routines used in model-in-the-loop (MIL) design tasks can be reused to create hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) tests for prototype controllers. This approach provides a high degree of flexibility and adaptability when responding to any problems that are discovered during testing and when facing the challenge of adding further test cases resulting from project requirement changes.
Phil Hester, who had thirty years of experience in key engineering and management positions at companies like AMD and IBM, before taking on his current role as Senior Vice President for R&D at National Instruments, highlighted the importance of eliminating this wall, stating that: “To keep quality and budgets under control amidst growing product and market complexities, engineering teams should view the software and hardware test components as a common DNA that persists throughout the entire development process, from requirements definition to production test.”
This represents a change in mindset for many companies, who traditionally view design and test as discrete segments of the development chain. Whilst the goals and purposes of the design and test stages inherently differ, many of the individual tasks involved are similar or identical. Use of a single software tool throughout development allows companies to clone and tweak design tasks to meet their test requirements.
With this streamlined approach, new innovations can be fast-tracked to ubiquity. Manual vacuum-cleaning, sweeping and even lawn-mowing, could be a thing of the past – but please could someone invent me an automatic desk-tidier?
Jeremy Twaits is Technical Marketing Engineer for National Instruments UK & Ireland
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