Market Overview

Test and Measurement (T&M) equipments are used across all electronic equipment industries from consumer, automotive, defense, semiconductor manufacturing, professional video broadcast and communications.

They are critical in how they are used to verify functionality and performance during R&D, manufacturing, and even after installation. As a whole, the $20 billion T&M market will experience small to moderate long-term growth, with higher growth expected for the communications sector, which makes up major portion of the industry at roughly 37%. The communications test and measurement market in 2001 was worth $4.4 billion and forecasted to be worth $5.3 billion in 2006, a 4.4% CAGR.

Xilinx Solutions for Test & Measurement - Solving Design Challenges

Xilinx programmable logic devices provide everything you need to build high-performance, flexible, and cost effective test & measurement equipment with quick time-to-market. For example, in high-end, chassis based communications or video broadcast test equipment, a designer can use the Virtex-II Pro series of FPGAs to implement custom traffic generators and analyzers, framers/MACs, high speed parallel chip-to-chip, chip-to-memory, or chip-to-backplane interfaces, and even multi-gigabit serial interfaces. On-chip PowerPC processors also enable functions such as TCP/IP stacks for network simulation.

Designers of portable or bench-top test equipment with low-cost/high-volume requirements can use the Spartan series of FPGAs in a system to interface to various ADCs and memory, perform 32-bit microprocessing with the MicroBlaze soft processor, interface to various peripherals such as CD ROM drives, displays, and more. Spartan-3 FPGAs with its density range of 50,000 to 5 million gates and unparalleled connectivity, DSP processing capabilities are ideal for applications including network analyzers, protocol analyzers and test equipment for everything from fiber optics and LANs/WANs to video and automation. For handheld designs requiring low cost and low power, Xilinx also provides the CoolRunner series of CPLDs. The presentations below show how Xilinx can enable your next Test & Measurement design.

• Xilinx Solutions for Network Test and Measurement
• Xilinx Solutions for Professional Broadcast Test & Measurement

System Block Diagrams

Below system block diagrams highlight some examples of Xilinx Solutions being used in Test and Measurement applications.

• Traffic Analyzer / Performance Monitor Module
• Optical Spectrum Analyzer
• Picture Quality Monitoring