Instrumentation
Design & Test Technology provides automated test and measurement systems for use in manufacturing or R&D applications. Such systems can be built using off-the-shelf hardware (e.g., National Instruments) or our own custom hardware such as the MeasureBoard series.
MeasureBoard Series
The MeasureBoard series of hardware was designed to perform parametric testing of magnetic read/write heads and magnetic recording media. A complete MeasureBoard unit consists of a boardstack containing two measurement boards, a Linux-based CPU board to provide embedded control and an interface to an external host computer, and an interface buffer board to provide signal buffers and anti-aliasing filters to the external read/write head interface.
The measurement board incorporates a variety of features that were customized for magnetic recording testing, such as:
- A digital pattern generator to provide a data signal for the external write-driver. This pattern generator is fully programmable, allowing the user to program both the data pattern and the data rate.
- High-speed 12-bit analog-to-digital (ADC) for digitizing the analog signal from the read head. This ADC was selected for superior spectral performance in order to allow accurate measurement of low level spectral components.
- An FPGA-based signal processing logic block to perform real-time digital signal processing on the digitized read signal. This logic block can be reprogrammed on-the-fly to support any desired data processing function (e.g., generate an external trigger pulse when a specific anomaly occurs in the input signal).
- A programmable digital bandpass filter for performing spectral analysis of the digitized read signal.
The first generation of this series was produced in 1997 and was the first to implement our patented peak detection technology. This version had one 40 MSPS ADC per board, allowing it to analyze one magnetic read channel per board. It used a set of four Altera Flex 10K devices to implement the programmable logic block along with 16MB of DRAM.
The second generation of this series was first produced in 2003. This verion had four 80 MSPS ADCs per board, allowing it to analyze four magnetic read channels per board. It also provided larger FPGAs, using one Altera ACEX EP1K100 device and 32MB of DRAM for each measurement channel.
The third generation of this series was first produced in 2006. This version has four 200 MSPS ADCs per board, allowing it to analyze four magnetic read channels per board. It provides one Altera Stratix II device and 64MB of DRAM for each measurement channel.