The ability to perform efficient and accurate production testing in high-volume manufacturing facilities is crucial; test systems must be capable of automatically testing and diagnosing faults in the shortest possible time. Automated test equipment (ATE) is designed to address these challenges.

ATE is used in many different industries, testing everything from individual components, such as RF semiconductors, to complete electronic systems. Analog-to-digital conversion is a common function in mixed-signal ATE and requires digitizers with a higher performance than the device under test (DUT). This performance margin ensures the correct characterization of the DUT and plays a pivotal part in the time efficiency of this process.

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Using oscilloscopes or digitizers

Traditional measurement systems are based on oscilloscopes. An oscilloscope is a lab equipment well recognized for its flexibility and adaptability to a diversity of measurement.

A digitizer is designed for being integrate in a system with a re-defined set of measurement tasks and to perform the same tasks as fast as possible in 24-7 operation.

The advantages of a digitizer are:

• High throughput which means minimized measurement time, which is low cost per measurement.
  
• Open API for full control from the test system. This means that the measurement sequence can be optimized.
• Small formfactor to save space in the rack.
• Multiple digitizers of different performance can be combined to achieve different types of measurements at different nodes of the DUT. Using different models optimize the cost of the system. For example, two boards of ADQ32 and one board of ADQ33 can form 4 channels at 2.5 GSPS and 2 channels at 1 GSPS.
  

The digitizers are available as individual unit for integration in an existing PC. There are also reference designs available for various levels of integration.​

Measurement sequence optimization

The traditional oscilloscope has a sequential way of operating which is necessary in a lab environment and may also be a good choice for the verification phase. In the figure below the measurement phase is completed, then the data is transferred to the user’s PC. Then the result is analyzed and/or plotted. This is very good for iterative investigations.

The measurement speed is optimized in the data flow of the digitizer. See figure below. As soon as a measurement is completed, the data is transferred. The digitizer is ready to take a new measurement while the data is transferred. The read-time between measurements is almost 0.