Let’s Redesign Test & Measurement for Next-Gen Technologies
Summary
Across many areas of technology development, project managers must balance mitigating technical risks, squeezing costs, and tightening schedules all while striving to maintain and extend competitive advantages. They can run on electricity sometimes, but compared to clean-sheet designs, they lose out on the substantially lower maintenance costs, better handling and performance, and improved safety that a full EV platform can provide. These next-generation upgrades have allowed the industry to challenge established norms with an eye toward delivering more efficiency in a testing solution that’s faster, smaller, and more affordable than traditional approaches. Advances in field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), which can be completely reconfigured based on project needs, are proving to be the key platform for integrating a full suite of software-defined instruments into one piece of hardware, creating a new solution that is much greater than the sum of its parts. For example, using a digital twin — a virtual representation of a physical system — enables far more flexible characterization and scenario testing, decreasing the number of required hardware spins and accelerating development timelines.