James J. Truchard

Evolving commercial instrumentation to meet the needs of scientific research

The scale and complexity of research is growing at enormous rates requiring the instrumentation capabilities and associated technologies to keep up with the evolving demands. Additionally, the current economic climate puts even more focus on keeping projects under budget and on time. This makes leveraging the latest commercially available technology even more crucial for researchers that require testing and prototyping systems. Leveraging commercially available technology with software that abstracts complexity enables domain experts to take advantage of the latest innovations and R&D investment in FPGAs as well as multicore processors without being an expert. Software development environments and tools providing a single development flow can expedite time to prototype and test facilitating heterogeneous multiprocessing through abstraction and enabling code reuse spanning design and test. Dr. Truchard will discuss new designs that have the capability to cope with the constraints of operability, scalability, flexibility and maintainability while minimizing cost, power consumption and space requirements.

Sophisticated measurements demand flexible solutions

The test and measurement industry has undergone two major shifts in the last decade. The first of these emphasises the use of test to verify correctness of the manufacturing process rather than testing functional specifications of the end product. The second is a move away from proprietary test systems to more flexible systems built on broadly based standards.