ITEST is a sister company of AMCAD. In order to better support both company’s customers, our IQSTAR software platform now offers control of BILT chassis, making it possible to provide modular test solutions.
As an application example, a digital control of a programmable step attenuator is performed, and the measurement of S parameters are done on the attenuator mounted in front of an amplifier.
The customer’s request was to provide a global automation, and the results had to be displayed within an interactive measurement report.
To reach this target, IQSTAR takes control of a modular test chassis. The chassis has 14 slots, each slot can accommodate a specific card. In this example, BE5845 cards are mounted in the chassis, each cared alone allows control of 6 independent +/-15V & +/-200mA sources.
The need was to use this solution for a 0V/3.3V digital control for a 6-bit command. For each card, IQSTAR allows here to specify the card and the channel chosen for the least signif icant bit, and the channel for the most significant bit, the number of channels to be used for the control, the high- and low-voltage value for every bit.
A sweep plan then allows the test plan to be rolled out automatically for all the attenuation values specified. For each desired attenuation value, the Whiteboard tool is then used to display the measured S parameters of the subsystem (absolute and relative values).
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