Research And Implementation Of Hardware Shared Platform Of Universal Test Instrument

Test instruments are widely used for data acquisition in automatic test system. Traditional instruments with single function are unable to meet the complex testing requirements, some instruments with redundant functionality may cause waste of resources and costs, besides, the volume of the instruments is very large and it’s also difficult to achieve data sharing among the instruments. Aimed to solve these problems, the article proposes a universal and open platform, which integrates the common features of different instruments. According to different products under test, front modules can be customized to construct new instruments. The article conducts the following researches:1) The overall scheme is proposed. Aimed to overcome the shortcomings of traditional automatic test system, the basic structure of hardware shared platform is put forward. To realize a universal, modularized, and networked design, the hardware shared platform is divided into two parts, they are the host module and power module. Moreover, the functionality and their key technology is mentioned.2) The instrument host is researched and implemented. According to the requirements of ATS, an applicable microprocessor is selected, building up a universal platform, and realizing the functions of floating point computation, high-speed storage, large capacity storage, all kinds of network communication. During the research, signal integrity of high-speed circuit such as DDR3 is analyzed. What’s more, the heat dissipation problem of the instrument is solved with thermal simulation technology.3) Stable power supply is researched and implemented. The article proposes a distributed power architecture, to drive the common platform, as well as all the front modules. The power integrity of high speed digital system is analyzed, and a reliable management method based on CAN bus is designed to monitor the front modules in case short circuit fault occurs.4) An embedded operation system is transplanted and implemented. Aimed to achive complex task management on the common platform, the article researches the features of operation system used for instrument, and achieves the transplantation of U-Boot and embedded Linux OS, building up a basic task management platform for the instrument.Finally, a model machine is designed. Through experiments, the basic functions of the hardware shared platform are verified. Researches on the hardware shared platform of field instrument can shorten the development cycle of automatic test system, and reduce the costs for the users.