New M920 offers 50 MHz data rates, 128K pattern memory, hybrid pin capability, and wider voltage levels

SALT LAKE CITY, UT - Aug. 25, 1998 - Teradyne (NYSE: TER) announced a new 50 MHz channel card for its M9-Series of VXI Digital Test Instruments today at AUTOTESTCON '98 in Salt Lake City, Utah. In addition to faster data rates, the new M920 channel card offers 128K of pattern memory per channel, hybrid pins for greater flexibility in mixed-signal testing, and increased voltage levels to address a wider range of technologies. Teradyne has received orders totaling $3.5 million for the M920.

The M920 channel card offers new price-performance options for VXI system integrators.

The M9-Series offers compact, high-performance C-size digital test instruments designed to meet the configuration and performance requirements of VXI system integrators. With a VXIplug&play Windows NT framework software driver and hardware that is compliant with VXI interface standards, M9-Series instruments are easily integrated with other VXI-based instruments in automatic test systems (ATS) and specialized test equipment (STE) for defense and avionics programs. They have been integrated in commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) test equipment supplied to the U.S. Department of Defense, including the U.S. Marines Corps TETS and the Air Force JSTARS tester, and designed into the Army IFTE program. M9-Series instruments have also been designed into a number of third-party test systems, including the Honeywell H3500, ManTech Aurora and WesTest 2000.

"The M9-Series is the ideal solution for ATE suppliers who need to upgrade the digital capabilities of their legacy systems to meet the requirements for testing modern defense electronics", said Andy Hutchinson, Teradyne M9-Series product manager. "These instruments deliver the high-performance capabilities required for digital functional test, plus they provide all the advantages of a standards-based, commercial-off-the-shelf product--easy configurability, high reliability, and lower acquisition and maintenance costs."

The new channel card offers 48 bidirectional, programmable-voltage test channels with data rates from 100 Hz to 50 MHz. With 128K of pattern memory per channel, the M920 has the capacity to handle long pattern sequences efficiently and capture complete pass/fail data for every pattern in a single pass, ensuring efficient generation of high-resolution fault-dictionary diagnostics. Hybrid pin capability offers greater flexibility in mixed-signal testing. Wider voltage levels - 20V range and 15V swing - enables the M920 to address a broader range of technologies.

Volume shipments of the M920 begin in the first quarter of 1999. Pricing in North America for a basic instrument package, including one 50 MHz channel card, one Central Resource Board (CRB), the VXIplug&play driver, and a one-year warranty, is $54,500. An M9-Series instrument can be configured with up to 11 M920 channel cards, for a total of 528 digital test channels. Pricing for each additional channel card can be obtained through your sales engineer. M9-Series digital test instruments can be configured with any VXIplug&play -compliant slot 0 controller.

The M9-Series takes advantage of VXI interface standards and advanced packaging techniques to provide more digital test capability with greater cost efficiency and higher reliability than has ever been available in a C-size VXI instrument. The CRB supplies system-wide clock generation, channel deskewing to maintain timing accuracy, and guided-probe electronics for fault diagnosis. All other signal control functions are distributed on the channel cards, which provide the capabilities required for developing high-fault-coverage functional tests:

• 1 ns edge placement resolution
• Absolute accuracy specified across all pins at the UUT interface
• 256 timing sets, switchable on the fly, per pin and per pattern
• Per-pin timing control
• Two sets of drive/detect levels, selectable per pin
• 5 data formats selectable per pin

M9-Series digital test instruments accurately emulate complex test signals and reliably deliver tests to a unit-under-test (UUT), significantly reducing the time and effort required to develop or rehost, integrate, and debug test programs. The instruments can use the VXI trigger bus or sync resources on the CRB for high-accuracy triggering to support mixed-signal testing at high speeds.

The VXIplug&play Windows NT driver included with the M9-Series provides a graphical soft front panel for "benchtop" access and programming. The driver also serves as a programmatic interface to all Application Development Environments (ADEs) supported in the Windows NT Framework as well as the TYX PAWS ATLAS ADE.

Teradyne is the world's largest supplier of automatic test equipment and software for the electronics and telecommunications industries, and a leading supplier of high-performance backplane assemblies and connectors. The company's Assembly Test Division is a major supplier of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) functional test systems and test development software for board, box, and system-level test. Headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, Teradyne reported 1997 sales of approximately $1.26 billion. The company's address on the World Wide Web is www.teradyne.com.

TestStudio, VICTORY, and Spectrum 9000-Series are trademarks, and LASAR is a tradename, of Teradyne, Inc. All other product names are trademarks of their respective owners.