November 2015
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Gartner estimates there will soon be more
connected devices than there are humans on
the planet. By 2022, each household could
contain more than 500 connected devices, cre-
ating 35 zettabytes of data that the communi-
cations infrastructure must be able to handle.
With new intelligent devices being introduced
to the marketplace and new communications
standards and protocols proliferating, compa-
nies need to ensure they have a scalable frame-
work to design, prototype and test these M2M
communications to stay ahead of their com-
petition. Traditional automated test equip-
ment (ATE) was optimized to test technology
that harnessed the power of Moore’s Law,
and it does this very well. But over the past
few decades, a subtle shift to integrate more
analog technology into ICs has resulted in a
test challenge that requires much more than
Moore. Innovation for the IoT has tasked test
engineers with verifying mixed-signal sys-
tems that include both digital and analog sig-
nals from sensors, RF antennas and more, all
at consumer volumes and for the lowest price
possible. For test challenges tomorrow, tradi-
tional ATE falls short. Test engineers will need
smart ATE for the IoT smart devices. ST-Er-
icsson is a case in point.
ST-Ericsson is an industry leader in semi-
conductor development for smartphones and
tablets. It has development and test centers
worldwide and multiple characterization labs
that test and validate RF components and plat-
forms used in the company products. These
platforms usually contain multiple radios
such as GPS, Bluetooth, 3G and 4G, among
others. For one test set, a platform needs to
make about 800,000 measurements. The
complex nature of the chips that ST-Ericsson
develops requires validation labs that are pli-
able enough for a variety of RF standards, but
also have high enough performance for very
stringent tests. Even interfacing with these
chips requires multiple standard and custom
digital protocols. Traditional boxed instru-
ments such as RF analyzers, generators and
digital pattern generators are bulky, expensive
and simply not flexible enough. ST-Ericsson
test engineers have replaced their traditional
boxed instruments with the NI PXI platform
and chose to use NI FlexRIO - which contains
a Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA - to communicate
with different digital standards such as serial
peripheral interface (SPI) and inter-integrated
circuit (I2C). When a digital adapter module
was unavailable, the team quickly developed
its own without having to worry about the
back end to the PC and communication with
the FPGA. Overall, the PXI-based system was
10 times faster and three times less expen-
sive than the previous solution, the company
reported. The PXI platform also provided the
flexibility needed to adapt to multiple digital
and RF standards.
Airbus, a leader in aircraft manufacturing, is
launching a research-and-technology project
aimed at pushing emerging technologies to
improve the competiveness of its manufactur-
ing processes, still dominated by manual oper-
ations today. The Airbus “Factory of the Future”
implies the extensive use of a modular platform
with a high abstraction level based on COTS
modules. Smarter tools are key components
for improving efficiency in the Factory of the
Future. These smart devices communicate with
a main infrastructure or locally with operators,
but only when needed to provide situational
awareness and make real-time decisions based
on local and distributed intelligence in the net-
work. In the case of a manufacturing facility,
smart tools can help simplify the production
process and improve efficiency by removing
physical data logs and manuals. Operators
must focus on their operational tasks, during
which they need to keep their hands free for
using the appropriate tools. Most previous
initiatives of Airbus involved paperless proj-
ects that focused on paper suppression or on
replacing paper with tablets; they still con-
sumed passive, “dead” data.
Smart tools provide an alternative, data in
context, which is generated and consumed
continuously - in other words, live data. Air-
bus tested the Zynq-SoC-based NI SOM
as the foundation platform for all of these
smart tools. Use of the NI SOM speeded up
the development process from design to pro-
totype to deployment. Before developing
on the NI SOM, Airbus created a prototype
built around a Zynq-SoC-based Compac-
tRIO controller (NI cRIO-9068) that allowed
them to integrate IP from existing Airbus
libraries and open-source algorithms to val-
idate their concepts quickly. The flexibility
of using graphical and textual programming,
along with reusing third-party development
ported on top of the Xilinx Zynq-SoC, and
the NI Linux RTOS offered the perfect level of
abstraction for developing these tools. Airbus
engineers can now reuse the code they devel-
oped on the NI SOM as a deployed solution
rather than having to restart the entire design
process. Airbus evaluated several SOMs and
embedded single-board computers (SBCs),
and found there was no comparison with the
NI platform-based design approach and hard-
ware-software integration. Airbus engineers
estimate that their time to deliver with the
NI SOM is a tenth of what it would be using
Figure 5. Smart grid architecture with an open, extensible approach to intelligent devices allows
grid engineers to quickly respond to rapidly evolving measurement and control needs.
NI LabVIEW Reconfigurable I/O (RIO) architecture is based on four components: a processor,
a reconfigurable FPGA, modular I/O hardware and graphical design software.
