What is a BenchPress?
By Joshua Israelsohn, Technical Editor -- EDN, September 29, 2005
Most succinctly put, the BenchPress projects are a series of articles based upon instrumented measurements or observations. Their purpose is not to confirm or refute manufacturers' spec-table claims, but rather to examine products and their underlying technologies in a lab environment and to ask and answer questions that a product's data sheet may not fully address.
The BenchPress projects provide an opportunity for EDN technical editors to dig deeper into a technical topic than one can simply by relying on vendor-provided information, no matter how candid. They allow us to develop and report insights that are directly relevant to an OEM design engineer's information needs, concerns, and interests. The BenchPress projects take advantage of the fact that EDN technical editors are degreed electrical engineers with many years of design experience and a working familiarity with the wide range of products from which OEM designers draw.
Due to the high cost of instrumentation—a cost that rises dramatically with measurement bandwidth—BenchPress projects will most likely initially focus on narrow-bandwidth products, technologies, and applications in which measurement bandwidths less than 1 GHz suffice. The first such project, which appears as this issue's cover story, is a good example. In part one of "Flexible silicon: GUI-programmable audio processors," which begins on page 60, I begin to examine the traits of two high-level programmable audio devices and their design-support environments. This project would not have been possible without the support of Audio Precision Inc, which provided the core measurement capability in the form of the dual-domain, computer-controlled SYS-2722 audio analyzer. EDN would like to thank Audio Precision co-founder Bruce Hofer and President Alan Miksch for their generous support of the BenchPress projects.
