Teaming upon design and test

• Published in: Test & Measurement World Vol. 29; no. 7; p. 33
• Main Author: Nelson, Rick
• Format: Magazine Article Trade Publication Article
• Language: English
• Published: Boston UBM Canon LLC 01.08.2009; AspenCore
• Subjects: Aerospace engineering; Architects; Collaboration; Design; Embedded systems; Engineers; Field programmable gate arrays; Manycompanies; Robotics; Software; Software utilities; Subject specialists; Systems design; Test equipment
• ISSN: 0744-1657

No longer isolated disciplines, design and test work together, and test tools are taking on design tasks. Powerful high-level software tools give domain experts in such diverse fields as aerospace engineering and medical electronics increasing control over the design and verification of embedded systems. What's more, the tools themselves are adapting, with graphical design environments intended for test now aiding the design process, and design, modeling, and simulation tools enabling such techniques as HIL (hardware-in-the-loop) testing. A firm that sees opportunities in working with domain experts is National Instruments. NI has been promoting its LabView graphical design software, which initially served test-and-measurement applications, as a tool for embedded-system design. PJ Tanzillo, biomedical segment lead and embedded software manager at NI, cited another customer who has successfully applied NI's tools in an embedded-system design project: Sanarus, which used the tools as it developed the Visica 2 cryoablation system for the treatment of tumors. Tanzillo described the systems engineer on the project, Jeff Stevens, not as a domain expert but as an EE by training whose expertise is at the systems-architecture level-rather than at the coding and hardware-optimization level.