Advantest Introduces Wave Scale MX Channel Card to Meet Testing Requirements for High-Resolution Converters, Consumer Audio ICs and IoT Devices

Leading semiconductor test equipment supplier Advantest Corporation (TSE: 6857) has added a high-resolution, highly accurate mixed-signal channel card to its Wave Scale MX product family, extending the series’ range in testing analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog waveform converters. The new Wave Scale MX high-resolution card combines the industry’s highest parallel testing capability with the most reliable AC and DC performance. These attributes allow Advantest’s V93000 test platform to meet the increasing low-distortion, accuracy and linearity requirements in testing analog and digital waveform converters while also helping to reduce the cost of test and time to market for consumer audio and IoT devices.

“Our new high-resolution Wave Scale MX card has the highest channel count and density,” said Hans-Juergen Wagner, senior vice president of the SoC Business Group at Advantest Corporation. “The card can support wider signal ranges and enable higher output levels from audio components.”

The card provides high performance and fully independent AC and DC testing across as many as 32 instruments – 16 arbitrary waveform generators (AWGs) and 16 digitizers – for either single-ended or differential signals. It has local, temperature-controlled references that ensure the highest DC stability over time, and single-ended signals can be referenced to a ground sense per channel to achieve the highest fidelity. An additional parametric measurement unit (PMU) at each pogo ensures highly accurate DC measurements. The card also can handle swings of up to 20 Vpp for single-ended signals and 40 Vpp for differential signals. All functions are controlled by Testprocessor software to maximize throughput and repeatability.

The innovative architecture of Wave Scale MX cards enables simultaneous testing on all 32 instruments with totally different settings as there are no shared resources. The resulting in-site parallelism and high multi-site efficiency significantly reduces the cost of test for complex mixed-signal devices.

In addition to a card with exclusively high-resolution resources, Advantest also is introducing a Wave Scale MX hybrid card that combines high-resolution and high-speed functions on a single card.

Advantest is now accepting orders for its high-resolution and hybrid Wave Scale MX cards.