From the December 2008 issue of AutoEMC News:
SAE International and AEM Sign Standards Development Agreement
The SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) International and the Association of Equipment Manufacturers (AEM) signed a memorandum of agreement (MOU) to further the development of standards for the off-highway industry.
AR Release Automotive Transient Generator System
Possibly not since they had their fall-out with EM Test has AR really had much to offer the Automotive test field, so although this looks rather large, it also looks relatively comprehensive.
So Do Kikusui
Must be the latest thing as within the same month as AR announce a transient tester, so did Kikusui? I recall the days when only Schaffner (now Teseq) made this type of equipment, just shows how popular Automotive EMC testing is becoming.
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December 22nd, 2008
Bosch recently opened its largest Asia-Pacific automotive winter test center in Yakeshi, Inner Mongolia. At the center, Bosch will perform cold-weather testing of vehicle safety systems for customers in China and the Asia-Pacific region.
Yakeshi, 1,100 km north of Beijing, is an ideal location for winter test facilities, as winter there lasts five months, from November to March. The average temperature is -30 C and snow depth reaches its maximum of 30 cm in February.
December 22nd, 2008
The Kentucky Post reports that:
A four-month-long investigation by the Scripps station in Kansas City has uncovered government videos, photos, and thousands of pages of reports detailing human corpses being used like impact test dummies in National Highway Traffic Safety Administration funded tests.
December 22nd, 2008
The LXI Consortium (LAN eXtensions for Instrumentation) announced today that it has approved and released Revision 1.3 of the LXI Standard.
Revision 1.3 of the LXI Standard allows a manufacturer of Class C compliant instruments to customize their offerings by adding selected features from Class B or Class A categories. Users benefit from an expanding selection of products with advanced features without having to pay for features they don’t need.
The LXI Standard defines three classes of instruments with various degrees of functionality. LXI Class C provides the key features of an LXI compliant instrument, which are LAN and web server functionality. Class B and Class A provide progressively expanded functionality, most specifically in timing and triggering.
The Class B and Class A features that can now be included in Class C devices include:
- Trigger Bus
- Event Messaging
- IEEE 1588 Synchronization
- Time Stamped Data
- Event Logs
To review the new specification, visit the LXI Consortium site at www.lxistandard.org.
December 3rd, 2008
AR RF Microwave Instrumentation has released new literature with comprehensive information on its innovative test systems for conductive immunity and automotive transient generator testing. The new brochure includes AR’s CI (Conducted Immunity) Systems, self-contained, all-in-one test systems; and the company’s TGAR Systems for automotive transient generator testing.
The CI Systems are designed to make RF conducted immunity testing easier and more efficient by simplifying the entire process — calibrating, testing, DUT troubleshooting, and reporting.
TGAR Systems are advanced automotive transient generator test systems that easily adapt to the diverse and ever-changing specifications in the automotive industry.
The brochure includes technical information for all the CI and TGAR models, along with a listing of all the test standards that are programmed into the systems.
Complimentary hard copies are available from AR distributors and sales associates and can be downloaded from the AR/RF Microwave website.
November 24th, 2008
This webcast will evaluate the non-banner specifications of waveform digitizers. The discussion will include looking beyond the specification sheet’s usual banner listings into such topics as bandwidth, sampling rate, bit resolution and memory depth. A host of performance criteria will be taken into account to determine the actual measurement fidelity the digitizer system can be given. Topics will include signal to noise ratio (SNR), effective number of bits (ENOB), clock accuracy, aperture time and uncertainty, trigger jitter, bandwidth response curve and why a trigger-time-interpolator enhances timing measurement results.
When: December 9, 2008 10:00a.m. PT, duration 1 hour
Where: To register: www.agilent.com/find/bannerspecs
November 21st, 2008
Here’s an article I wrote for Test&Measuerment World after attending the latest Auto Test Expo. It really amazed me that there were so many data-acquisition vendors there. It has to be awfully difficult for any one of them to really stand out. Even the smallest of them has their niche, though.
November 21st, 2008
The Agilent Technologies L4532A 2-channel and L4534A 4-channel digitizers are high-performance, stand-alone LXI digitizers that offer simultaneous sampling at up to 20 MS/s, and with 16-bit resolution. Agilent claims that these products represent a new category of digitizers with their robust input channel and high performance analog-to-digital (A/D) design, and on-board measurements. The isolated input channels can measure up to ±250V and are designed to handle demanding applications requiring electromechanical device control for product test or characterization.
The new Agilent high-resolution LXI digitizers were designed with input from engineers on waveform analysis in automotive, aerospace/defense, communications and medical applications. As a result of this input, the high-performance design, with a choice of noise filters, has reduced the need to add expensive signal conditioning prior to digitizing waveforms. The digitizers include on-board “scope-like” measurements such as Vmin/Vmax, Vp-p, frequency and rise/fall time that can be applied to a selected portion or the overall waveform. The on-board measurements save post-processing time and minimize the need to transfer and store large amounts of data.
The Agilent L4532A and L4534A are fully compliant with the LXI class C specification. They include USB 2.0, and Gigabit Ethernet (LAN) interfaces as standard features, enabling quick and simple connectivity to a PC or a network. In addition, they can be remotely operated from any browser by simply connecting to the built-in Web page.
The Agilent L4532A 2 channel 20MS/s digitizer is priced at $6,500, and the
L4534A 4 channel 20MS/s digitizer is $8,500. Extended memory is an additional $1,500. The digitizers are available for order now and will be shipped in December 2008.
November 20th, 2008
