Let’s face it; advancements in technology far outpace the capability of ATE instrumentation to directly align with tomorrow’s performance requirements. The minute a new piece of hardware is released it is too late. The evolution of test, standards, and application is a moving target. How can a piece of static hardware designed with today’s technology test, verify, and specify tomorrow’s devices? Consider also, that ATE customers are resistant to change; changes to the configuration, capacity, or status quo of their respective manufacturing flow affects cost of test, COT, and similarly cost of ownership, COO. It is incumbent upon the ATE vendor to proactively develop capability beyond the intended means of the hardware to meet this new requirement in an ever changing technology environment to reduce COT & COO. At the same time we need to provide the customer with the confidence that the install base will meet future manufacturing test demands. Comfort and familiarity breeds’ confidence in a world of “status quo”.
I’m sure many of you know Sol Max and his area of expertise but for those of you that don’t let me give you a little background. Sol, now an LTX-Credence Fellow, was one of the sevenoriginal founders of LTX back in the late 70’s (and yes you can still find Sol in our Norwood, MA headquarters working on some challenging engineering problem). Throughout his career Sol has authored numerous technical papers, many of them on different strategies and techniques for testing data converters. In my humble opinion Sol is the preeminent expert on data converting testing.
