Test Evolution announces industry's first AXIe development kit

HOPKINTON, USA: Test Evolution Corp., a leading designer and manufacturer of test products based on the AXIe 3.1 (AdvancedTCA Extensions for Instrumentation and Test) open standard, announced its AXIe Development Kit as part of the Evolution series of test systems focused on the semiconductor test market.

The new AXIe Development Kit brings to the semiconductor industry an instrument and system design and debug environment to accelerate products developed for the AXIe 3.1 open test standard.

"The AXIe standard adds test extensions to the ATCA standard, enabling high performance instrumentation in an open standard modular solution,” said Lev Alperovich, president, Test Evolution. "The AXIe standard allows higher channel counts of high performance modular instrumentation over equivalent PXI-based solutions.”

Test Evolution’s AXIe Development Kit consists of an AXIe 3.1-compliant 14-slot cage that’s open on four sides for debugging, the recently introduced AXIe 3.1 System Module, and an AXIe 3.1-compliant Starter Board with mezzanine connectors for user-specific instrumentation. In addition, the Starter Board schematic and layout are freely available for monolithic instrument development.

The Development Kit supports all the functionality of AXIe 3.1, including robust backplane and front-panel triggering for inter-instrument control, 250MB/s PCI Express to all slots, in-system calibration support, and controllable load board power supplies. The AXIe Development Kit can also serve as the basis of a systems-oriented product with the addition of vendor designed packaging.

"The AXIe Development Kit will give instrument and system designers everything they need to quickly develop AXIe 3.1-compliant products," said David Oka, vice president, engineering, Test Evolution. "Independent instrument designers can now focus on what they do best—develop key test technologies without having to develop the entire system and board infrastructure."

The AXIe 3.1 Development Kit is compatible with National Instrument’s LabWindows and TestStand, and the IVI software standard, which are all widely used for device characterization, and easily coexists with PXI and LXI instruments and chassis. This capability allows for ATE instruments to be used for characterization. Later, the same instruments and test programs can be used in production, for both a cost and time savings for semiconductor device vendors.