Use of intelligent mezzanine carriers for legacy instrument replacement in VXI systems

Military and commercial automated test equipment (ATE) users are facing significant problems keeping their ATE supportable for the life cycle of the products they are being used to test. Further, the cost of completely replacing the system is often insignificant compared to the cost of replicating and re-certifying the test program software. As a result, requirements have increasingly surfaced to replace legacy equipment in such a manner as to re-use existing test program software. An approach using open standard mezzanine cards with platform specific carrier boards can provide an enormous selection of modern instruments from many different manufacturers, extensive reuse of legacy equipment and software, and a clear, easy migration path to existing and future platforms. Most common ATE instruments exist in a mezzanine format and carriers can be found for VXI, PXI, PCI, and many other platforms. Carriers can be non-intelligent allowing direct access to the mezzanine modules by the host software, or intelligent allowing on-board firmware to further emulate the legacy instrument.