Millimeter-wave chip company Maja Systems and Presto Engineering said this week that they have successfully collaborated on high-volume, automated production testing for Maja’s AirData products.
Michel Villemain, CEO of Presto Engineering, said in a statement that the company “developed custom solutions that allow us to use existing [automated test equipment], that have already been proven at volumes exceeding millions of units per year and can scale to meet projected demand.
“Scalable high-volume, high-frequency RF test solutions, like this one for Maja, will be critical for the industry to achieve the billion plus annual unit volumes projected for mmWave devices by 2020,” Villeman said.
“Presto’s special expertise in high-volume mmWave RF test was essential in bringing terabit connectivity to the market efficiently,” said Joy Laskar, CTO and SVP of Maja Systems. “They were able to develop a solution that provides reliable testing at the speeds and costs we need, and in a time frame that let us hit our market window.”
In other test news:
– A new report from Frost & Sullivan projects that testing for electronic and autonomous vehicles will drive $2.81 billion in test revenues by 2024, a compound annual growth rate of nearly 7%. Frost noted that the “share of electronics in a single car is expected to increase from 40 percent [in 2017] to more than 55 percent by 2024” and that automotive manufacturers are “beginning to adopt standardized technical services to test and issue test results that will be primarily monitored by regulatory authorities, thereby opening up new opportunities for test equipment vendors and service providers.”
In related news, the MIPI Alliance this week formed a new Automotive Working Group. Although the group’s interface work typically focuses on mobile devices, the new AWG plans to work with other MIPI Alliance groups on a new automotive physical layer specification for “longer reach applications,” as well as looking at MIPI’s existing standards for potentially adapting them for use in automotive applications.
“While MIPI’s focus is foremost on developing interface specifications for mobile devices, automakers already rely on MIPI’s industry-standard interfaces to enable a wide variety of applications,” said Joel Huloux, MIPI Alliance chairman. “This additional focus on automotive is a natural extension to broaden MIPI specifications’ applicability.”
Matt Ronning, chair of the MIPI AWG, said that the group “will help align key interfaces for cameras, lidars, radars, displays and more with OEMs’ specific requirements in automotive. As new MIPI interfaces are developed, while rooted in mobile, they will now also have an eye toward automotive.”
-The Optical Networking Forum and Ethernet Alliance are doing a joint demo of a 400 Gbps Ethernet at OFC in San Francisco next week, spotlighting the Flex Ethernet standard with 400 Gbps of FlexE traffic being sent over four bonded 100 GbE interfaces and interconnecting the two organizations’ booths. Participating companies include Intel, Huawei, Viavi Solutions, Tektronix and ZTE, among others, and EXFO plans to demonstrate its FlexE testing capabilities as well.
–National Technical Systems has a new chief information officer. The company has brought on Jeff Keene to lead its information technology-related work. Keene comes to NTS from DPI Specialty Foods, which is a distributor of chilled and frozen foods. He is an Arthur Anderson alum and NTS said that he has held a number of executive-level IT positions since joining Arbonne Internaitonal as its director of information technology in 2006.
–PCTel has added new features to its SeeHawk Touch Public Safety Testing Solution, which now has the ability to generate printable reports automatically to verify public safety network coverage.
