Mixed-signal channel card aids IoT device testing

These attributes allow Advantest’s V93000 test platform to meet the increasing low-distortion, accuracy and linearity requirements in testing analogue and digital waveform converters while also helping to reduce the cost of test and time to market for consumer audio and IoT devices.

“Our new high-resolution Wave Scale MX card has the highest channel count and density,” said Hans-Juergen Wagner, senior vice president of the SoC Business Group at Advantest Corporation. “The card can support wider signal ranges and enable higher output levels from audio components.”

The card provides high performance and fully independent AC and DC testing across as many as 32 instruments – 16 arbitrary waveform generators (AWGs) and 16 digitisers – for either single-ended or differential signals.

It has local, temperature-controlled references that ensure the highest DC stability over time, and single-ended signals can be referenced to a ground sense per channel to achieve the highest fidelity.

An additional parametric measurement unit (PMU) at each pogo ensures highly accurate DC measurements.

The card also can handle swings of up to 20V_pp for single-ended signals and 40V_pp for differential signals. All functions are controlled by Testprocessor software to maximize throughput and repeatability.

The architecture of Wave Scale MX cards enables simultaneous testing on all 32 instruments with totally different settings as there are no shared resources.

The resulting in-site parallelism and high multi-site efficiency significantly reduces the cost of test for complex mixed-signal devices.

In addition to a card with exclusively high-resolution resources, Advantest also is introducing a Wave Scale MX hybrid card that combines high-resolution and high-speed functions on a single card.