Analyst firm Frost & Sullivan has identified half a dozen drivers for the electronic test and measurement market over the next five years in a new report. Those drivers are: autonomous driving; 5G; the internet of things; data centers; power applications; and new, high-speed digital standards.
Of those six, Frost pegged three — 5G, autonomous driving and the need to design power applications for maximum efficiency — as the most significant electronic test market drivers for the coming years.
“The next wave of growth has begun with the technologies making their way down the product lifecycle, from research and development to manufacturing and deployment,” Frost & Sullivan said. “Greater complexity and technology convergence will spur demand across verticals, with the largest opportunities coming from communications, semiconductors and computing industries, and the fastest growth in industrial and automotive verticals.”
“Greater complexity in end-user technologies calls for an increased cost of test. However, with [radio frequency] proliferation in consumer devices, there is the notion that the cost of test equipment should follow that trend,” said Jessy Cavazos, industry director for test and measurement at Frost & Sullivan, in a statement. “It will be vital for market participants to come up with a new approach to test in the coming years as the traditional approach is not sustainable from cost and technical perspectives.”
In other test news:
–Keysight Technologies made a major in-kind gift to New York University’s wireless program — the largest in-kind donation ever made to the university’s Tandon School of Engineering. NYU Wireless will use the test equipment and software provided by Keysight for the exploration of millimeter wave and terahertz frequencies for data transmission and new applications in areas including medicine, computing and optics.
In related news, Keysight this week said that it has extended its collaboration with reverberation chamber testing company Bluetest to include test emulation support for over-the-air testing for 5G New Radio in sub-6 GHz frequencies. Keysight also announced a collaboration with Nokia on the use of its test tools — including its Nemo Outdoor field testing solutions, FieldFox spectrum analyzer and Nemo Analyze for data analysis and reporting — for 5G New Radio propagation in the field and verification of both indoor and outdoor coverage (sub-6 GHz and at millimeter wave frequencies) in a live test network.
-Rohde & Schwarz and Spirent Communications partnered on an integrated test offering for automotive Ethernet testing. The two companies said that the test solution covers “all physical and protocol layers for automotive Ethernet TC8 ECU test specifications. Both R&S and Spirent are members of the One-Pair Ether-Net (OPEN) Alliance Special Interest Group.
-The Wi-SUN Alliance has launched a new certification program for its Smart Ubiquitous Networking standards for large-scale IoT networks and appointed GlobalSign as the third-party supplier of digital certificates for program.
Integrated energy management company Landis+Gyr, which serves the utility industry and is a Wi-SUN Alliance member, has already announced its support for the new certification program.
– PoE Texas has released its second-generation power over Ethernet tester, which is smaller, with an increased testing range and the ability to test four pairs in preparation for the new IEEE 802.3bt PoE standard. The device can test DC power supply voltages from 3.5 to 56 volts and current up to 280 watts at 56 volts, according to PoE Texas.
–Signals Research Group was on the ground this week, testing Verizon’s 5G Technical Forum-based fixed wireless access network for its newly launched Verizon 5G Home service in Houston, Texas. Read the full story here.
-The Broadband Forum recently held a plugfest to test the interoperability of implementations of its User Services Platform for deploying and managing connected home devices. USP is an evolution of the forum’s TR-069 standard; plugfest participants included Arris, Nokia, QA Cafe, Axiros and Greenwave Systems, according to the forum, and interoperability was “achieved across all participants’ products.”
-Regional carrier Agri-Valley Services is partnering with Ericsson and hosted core services company NewCore Wireless to test the performance of 600 MHz spectrum for providing fixed wireless access LTE services. The trial will start in the fourth quarter in Caro, Michigan, and the three companies said it will be the first test of its kind with a regional U.S. carrier.
