Virtual instruments: The future of ATE is here today

Virtual Instruments (VI, also called instruments-on-a-Disk) is the next stage in the evolution of ATE. VI fundamentally changes the paradigm of how ATE is designed, built, fielded, supported and procured. The core of the VI concept is the idea that most instruments can be implemented in software, supported by a bare minimum of low-cost, commercial off-the-shelf hardware. The effect of VI is that the hardware cost of ATE is reduced dramatically, along with its life cycle cost. Flexibility is enhanced, for adding new instruments is reduced to adding software. In some cases, the VI approach allows measurement accuracies that considerably improve the current state-of-the-art. New stimulus and measurement techniques can be implemented using VI to measure the previously unmeasurable, and generate what was previously extremely difficult to generate. This paper describes the VI concept and one embodiment of VI: a flightline electronic warfare tester. That embodiment implements more than 12 complex instruments in less than a single VXI chassis