Applications ´90: instrumentation

Important developments in instrumentation during 1989 are described. A proposed design-for-testability standard embracing the boundary-scan technique was approved by voters in an IEEE letter ballot last August. The advent of smart sensors has led to the notion of universal instruments, standard boxes that can measure a variety of parameters when the appropriate sensors are plugged in. More than 40 of these instruments can be interconnected in a network to share data at rates up to 1 Mb/s. New international standards for the volt and ohm were to have gone into effect on New Year´s Day this year. Standards for the ampere and watt derive from those for the volt and ohm and, therefore, would also change. The need for standards to test microwave and millimeter-wave integrated circuits (MIMICs) manifested itself in the formation last year of the NIST (National Institute for Standards and Technology) Consortium for MIMIC Metrology. Composed of industry and government laboratories and spearheaded by NIST, the group is charged with producing standards for measuring the radio frequency and thermal characteristics of microwave monolithic ICs.<>