Utilities Middle East – August 2019

MARKET FOCUS

http://www.utilities-me.com August 2019 / Utilities Middle East 29

LTE or WiFion single platform is in demand from
the T&M industry. LTE, Cloud Computing, WiFi off
load, WLAN, Green telecom, M2M, Connected life
style, research toward 5G race are top trends for
the coming years.
Site sharing is another trend which continues
to result into lower CAPEX and OPEX. The all in
one box for production testing helps to save space,
time and cost during production. Field instru-
ment are more rugged now and they support mul-
tiple interface and technology, so that engineer do
not need to carry multiple instrument.
One of the emerging trends in the market is
the miniaturisation of test and measurement
equipment. Miniaturised test and measurement
equipment are fl exible and easy to use. The fast
growth in the electronics industry is leading to the

Electrical testing

equipment are in-

creasingly becoming

user-friendly

development of small-sized electronic devices for

which miniaturised test and measurement equip-

ment are required. For example, the test and mea-

surement equipment used in consumer electron-

ics and other minute components need to be very

small in size.

The trend to LTE advanced and the use of

smartphones is challenging test-and-measure-

ment (T&M) systems to stay ahead of advance-

ments in RF component performance and inno-

vations. As a result, T&M system designers will be

challenged to provide faster, extremely repeat-

able, rugged, and best-in-class testing environ-

ments. Test equipment will be expected to last

over multiple generations of product introduc-

tions, meaning that the performance require-

ments of the RFICs used in test equipment must

be better than the device under test by a factor of

several generations.

Further to this, next-generation communica-

tion systems that use higher-order modulation

schemes such as Orthogonal Frequency-Division

Multiplexing (OFDM), with high peak to average

ratios, are driving the need for the components

used in the test equipment’s signal chain to have

higher linearity.

Additionally, more frequency bands are

expected to be introduced, driving the need for

broader bandwidths and higher operating fre-

quencies. This new, crowded spectrum will

require additional fi ltering, so fi lter-bank switch-

ing is expected to drive the need for lower-loss

components.

Despite the fact that test solutions are grow-

ing in complexity, end customers will continue to

expect lower overall test costs per unit. In order

to accomplish this, test equipment must enable

lower overall test time, which can be accom-

plished by RF components with a fast settling time.

Also, there continues to be an increasing

reliance on software to diff erentiate and provide

fl exibility for future product expansion. This fun-

damental reliance on software drives device and

system manufacturers to look at ways to shorten

the software development lifecycle and reduce

costs, while at the same time increasing func-

tional complexity and improving software qual-

ity. Streamlining the development team and their

development processes through automation,

from requirements engineering and traceability,

down through verifi cation and deployment is a

way to achieve this.

Other factors pushing better automation of

test processes include: greater emphasis on the

safety- and security-critical market segments,

increased focus on software quality and reliabil-

ity; growing requirements for software certifi -

cation and risk mitigation as well as reduction in

development and verifi cation resources.

Device and system manufacturers are now

implementing traceable development processes

where requirements, from concept through to

code, automatically link to development and ver-

ifi cation artefacts, such as development plans,

design documents, verifi cation plans, test proce-

dures, and test results. Manual methods are no

longer adequate to properly test, execute, and

trace the results throughout the development pro-

cess both from a reliability and cost perspective.

According to industry analysts, engineers

must learn diff erent instrument UIs and strug-

gle with limited to no correlation across the ana-

logue, digital and RF signals. An aff ordable mixed-

domain oscilloscope (MDO) that combines a

mixed signal oscilloscope with a spectrum analy-

ser is greater than sum of its parts. Not only does it

reduce pressure on the equipment budget, it adds

the critical element of a single integrated view

across domains. As embedded RF continues to

grow, so will the market demand for MDOs.

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