Research Of Automatic Test System Based On Virtual Instrument

With the development of Automatic Test Equipment(ATE) from box-instrument to modularized instrument Automatic Test System(ATS) becomes more universal, but there are two problems existing in the development. One is the interchange ability of the instrument. Another is transportability of test programs.This paper gives the structure, principle and development status of ATS, studies VI technology and software criteria. Then the fact that VI with IVI drivers has lots of advantages such as good interchange ability, state cache, safe thread, checking range is found. Test program written by ATLAS language ;and signal-oriented detaches from the test instruments, then the system has good transportability. These two technologies solve two problems of ATS. This paper develops a ATS software platform with automatic performance and fault diagnosis capability used signal-oriented method. This software platform is made up of lots of components, so it has good reuse ability. The combination of fault diagnosis expert system and ATS improves the efficiency of looking for fault points, decreases the system maintenance time. A part of the whole software platform has been finished and will be used in the future.ATS is becoming more universal, but there are some problems if ATS is used for any equipment. It takes more time to develop fault diagnosis expert system to get to expert criteria.