Is Commercial Tech the Answer to Open Standard ATE?
By Jeff Chappell -- EDN, August 14, 2002
AUSTIN -- If an open architecture standard for automated test equipment (ATE) is going to succeed, it has to be built on a commercially available standard or else it’s not likely to succeed.
That’s the conclusion of National Instruments Corp. (NI), which has based its entire test and measurement business model on open standards and existing, commercially available technology. NI is also one of the founding members of the newly created Semiconductor Test Consortium (STC), which launched at Semicon West last month. The STC, spearheaded by Intel Corp. and Advantest Inc. and comprised of a handful of other chipmakers and instrument makers, wants to develop a low cost, open architecture test system.
Even before the launch of STC, NI talked with Intel, ATE vendors and others about open architecture ATE for the semiconductor industry, said Eric Starkloff, platform manager for PXI and instrument control at NI.
"As a business model they were interested in our success," Starkloff said. Intel even cited the PXI platform in its request for a proposal that led to the formation of the STC.
NI launched the PXI platform, an open, modular PC-based instrument platform, in the mid-1990s as a successor to the VXI modular platform. It launched the PXI Alliance to make it an open, industry-wide standard. There are some 560 PXI instruments available for the PC-based platform; most of them are from companies other than NI. There are more than 50 companies in the alliance.
But NI has had a lot of success with its own PXI instruments. Last year, for example, during its second quarter, it was the first time in the company’s 25-year history that it experienced a year-over-year decline in revenue growth. And yet during the same quarter, its PC-based products and integrated systems experienced 5 percent growth year-over-year.
NI has a peripheral interest compared to that of traditional big iron ATE vendors and instrument suppliers; only a small percentage of its revenue is derived from semiconductor and electronics testing. But obviously, it would like to see an open standard come to semiconductor ATE.
And the standard needs to be based on commercially available technology, Starkloff said. If the interface or basic system architecture is proprietary, even if it's an open standard, it won’t level the playing field for smaller vendors and it won't lower the cost of equipment, which is what chipmakers want.
Most instrument vendors, NI included, aren’t interested in making a high-cost instrument that would only serve a small market; it wouldn’t be economically feasible for them, Starkloff said.
While Teradyne has opened up its Integra FLEX tester to third party vendors, offering it as a competing open standard to that proposed by rival Advantest and the STC. NP Test, formerly Schlumberger Semiconductor Solutions Inc., has said it is working on its own open architecture test system. Having multiple, competing open standards won’t ultimately meet the needs of chipmakers or instrument vendors, Starkloff said.
"That’s only a small incremental step from where they are today," he said of that scenario. The answer is commercially available technology, he added.
"We faced the same thing with PXI … We rolled it out to third party vendors. Their success is our success," Starkloff said. "You actually have to have these modules and have these vendors supporting it for it to be useful to the end customer."
Naturally, NI would like to see the STC incorporate the concepts and technology demonstrated by PXI in its open standard ATE efforts. Starkloff noted that companies such as ATE startup Third Millennium Test Solutions Inc., which offers mixed signal and logic testers based on the PXI chassis, are demonstrating that it can be done.
