May 2008

EvaluationEngineering.com

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Manager’s Forum Designing a Company Ready for Any Given Tuesday Programming Language Is C Dead? Signal Sources The Colorful World of Noise Data Acquisition The Art and Science of Reliability Machine Vision Adding Color to Machine Vision Switching Systems Signal Switching Via Plug-In Cards EMC Test Radiated Susceptibility ATE Buyers

Manager’s Forum
Today’s managers must guide their companies in predictable, planned steps to achieve their goals while at the same time taking advantage of business opportunities that may present themselves at unpredictable times. Being prepared for Any Given Tuesday is a practice instituted and followed by Keith Barnes, chairman of the board at Verigy, and his management team to successfully address the day when everything changes. He explains how to handle these changes and still remain focused on the company’s goals.
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Programming Language
In spite of advantages claimed for several new languages, C has inherent strengths that continue to be important to test software developers. It has the capabilities to perform direct hardware manipulation and easily control how data is stored in memory and supports reuse of millions of lines of preexisting textual math code. Nevertheless, newer languages offer advantages such as object-oriented programming, memory management, and parallel execution. Read how you can integrate C code in an external programming language and benefit from the strengths of both.
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Signal Sources
Additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) approximates the interference present in many types of modern communications channels. And, because white Gaussian noise has a constant power spectral density, it’s commonly used to drive random vibration testing. EE delves into the mathematics and characteristics of white Gaussian noise and the instruments that generate it and also considers pink, red, blue, purple, and grey noise.
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Data Acquisition
Data acquisition is relatively straightforward when only a few forces or displacements are being recorded from a small device. Here’s a look at the methods and equipment used by John Deere engineers to monitor and record data from up to 256 widely scattered points on very large construction and forestry equipment. For difficult and mixed-signal applications like these, success depends on accurate synchronization across all channels, a large range of signal conditioning amplifiers to handle several types of signals, and comprehensive analysis software.
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Machine Vision
Whether a diode is grey, blue, brown, or black doesn’t make a lot of difference if it’s inserted backwards. Any monochrome vision system should be able to distinguish polarity. How about verifying the build quality of a frozen pizza? Suddenly, color seems much more important when you need to distinguish among orange, red, or green chopped peppers. This author examines the benefits of increasingly popular color machine vision in areas such as PCB inspection, bank-note scanning, and general material color and texture classification.
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Switching Systems
A large comparison chart accompanying this article shows the wide range of functionality possible within PXI and VXI switch modules. Nevertheless, there are proprietary switching systems that may be more economical for large applications. And, if you need to integrate switching distributed over significant distances, LXI may be a good solution. We focus on PXI and VXI plug-in switching modules but also present a balanced view that will help you decide which technology best suits your requirements.
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EMC Test
Running a susceptibility test is not conceptually difficult, but may become complicated in practice. The test is performed with the antennas in front of the EUT’s most susceptible RF pickup area. First, you need to find it. Then, you must test over a wide frequency range using a number of different types of antennas, and several signal generators and amplifiers. This article discusses susceptibility from several aspects, balanced by the author’s extensive practical EMC/RF experience.
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ATE Buyers Guide
For 27 years, EE readers have looked to our annual ATE Buyers Guide as the resource for information they need on specifying, approving, and buying automatic test equipment. Besides equipment, the guide includes testing consultants and systems integrators. It lists the companies and the equipment they offer such as automotive test systems, cable/harness testers, flying probers, board ATE, logic ATE, handlers, in-circuit ATE, memory ATE, parametric test systems, test software, and wafer probing systems.
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