Implementation Of Instrument Controlling-module And TPS Generation-tool In Signal-oriented ATS

Compared to manually test, automatic test system has its advantages such as easily to operate, high repetition, etc, therefore it is widely used. Taking internal instruments as its designing core, traditional automatic test system has inherent defects that TPS(Test Program Set) can not be transplanted and instruments are not interchangeable, thus resulting in problems such as long development cycle, complex maintenance and high cost. To solve these problems, IVI Foundation has proposed ideas for automatic test system design which are signal oriented and formulated some standards for system framework design and information exchange.The paper studies the design ideas and relevant standards, draws lessons from the design methods of common signal-oriented automatic test system, finishes the design and implementation of critical software modules in the background of the scientific research project “a board level fault diagnosis and testing platform”. The main contents of this paper are as follows:Firstly, combined to the software architecture of system platform and refer to IVI-Signal standard, the scheme of instrument controlling in the system is designed. The paper introduces the realization of IVI-Signal drivers of measuring and stimulating instruments in detail, with the examples of the digital multimeter and the arbitrary waveform generator.Secondly, in order to achieve the goal of none-programming for customs, a TPS code generation tool is studied and designed. It can analyze the XML(Extensible Markup Language) document based on the test description in IEEE1671 and generate test codes automatically. The TPS codes do not call the instrument driver directly and achieve a good TPS portability. At the same time, TPS-generation tool is made as Active X component, which has improved code reusability.Lastly, In partnership with members of the project, the system in software and hardware was built and debugged, the functions of the instrument-controlling module and TPS-generation tool were verified from the two aspects of writing test cases and the actual circuit boards.