Next-Generation Synthetic Instruments

Using COTS technology has long been a strategy to mitigate obsolescence management for long life-cycle products. Both test instruments and end users have employed many strategies to meet these product life-cycle demands, which can reach over 25 years for DOD; however few have been able to truly meet the demands while lowering the cost of ownership. A relatively new concept has been introduced that could potentially disrupt traditional test system architectures by focusing on specific test capability programmed on a single instrument. This concept has been coined software-designed, or software-designed synthetic instruments. The software-designed product breakthrough for RF test has expanded into other areas that will replace most discrete instruments, including digitizers and high-speed digital I/O. Although the use of virtual or synthetic instruments along with modular I/O helps minimize hardware costs and reduce test time, a software-designed instrument is a new approach that provides not only microprocessor software flexibility but an open, user programmable FPGA for further customization. For example, an RF power amplifier test can demonstrate a test time reduction of three orders of magnitude in a power leveling algorithm. A software-designed instrument can also be rearchitected to implement a real-time RF channel emulator by including complex mathematical fading models on the FPGA.