Interviews |
By Jean-Pierre Joosting
The first dedicated graphical design tool for signal switching and cabling systems, Test System Architect, simplifies signal path design for electronic test systems, allowing engineers to design, configure, and visualise complete test architectures before deployment. The free online tool from Pickering delivers an end-to-end workflow that integrates a variety of systems, including the System Configurator Tool, Schematic Design Tool, Product Selector, and Migration Tool, with previously released tools, including the Cable Design and Microwave Switch Design Tools.
Keith Moore, founder and CEO, explains: “Test System Architect is a tool built on previous technology, that Pickering used in the design of cables to enable designers to easily assemble test systems. In test accuracy is only as good as the signal path. We estimate that about 25% of the design effort for test systems is spent on assembling the signal path and system configuration. Getting this wrong affects the schedules, margin, and, of course, trust. Test System Architect originally started out as an in-house development for internal use. We quickly figured out that we should be improving this and pushing it out to customers as a tool to enable them to configure their test systems. However, Pickering still designs cable assemblies for its own products and customer test systems.”
“The Cable Design Tool was launched in 2016 to allow customers to graphically design and specify their own cable assemblies. In 2025, Pickering shipped over 12,000 cable assemblies virtually all designed using the Cable Design Tool. In 2023, Pickering added the Microwave Switch Design Tool, built on the same code base as the Cable Design Tool, to simply design and configure modular switching subsystems. Both software products were subsequently integrated into the broader Test System Architect toolset.”
Kyle Voosen, Product Marketing Manager at Pickering Interfaces and a signal switching and simulation expert, discusses the importance of this approach with eeNews Europe.
Kyle Voosen, Product Marketing Manager at Pickering
eeNews Europe: What is the reason for developing Test System Architect, and how does it help engineers designing and building ATE (automated test equipment) systems?
Hardware typically represents less than half of the total cost of an automated test system. The greater challenge for customers lies in the engineering, integration, and assembly effort required to deliver those systems into production. Test System Architect directly addresses this challenge by making the signal path explicit and architecturally visible earlier in the design process, resulting in faster system development, fewer integration errors, and a more predictable deployment schedule.”
Test System Architect, a complete signal path design toolset
eeNews Europe: With signal path design accounting for up to 25% of the total time needed to develop a test system, how does Test System Architect help here?
Designing the signal path of an automated test system can be laborious – and only gets harder when errors are discovered late in the process. Wiring mismatches, routing conflicts, and undocumented changes are often discovered during integration, when schedules are tightest.
While much of the industry conversation tends to focus on instruments and technologies, every customer who builds a test system must address the signal path – and yet it receives comparatively little attention and is a bottleneck in the entire process.
To understand the challenge, consider the type of system these departments are building. A typical production test environment – such as an end-of-line or functional test system for printed circuit boards used in aerospace, automotive, or medical applications – might involve a multi-unit clamshell fixture, a rack of PXI and box instruments, and Pickering switching modules to route signals and share instrumentation across multiple devices under test. These are highly custom, resource-intensive systems. The test engineering teams behind them are often multidisciplinary, sometimes working in dispersed or siloed groups, and yet 100% of them spend time developing and routing that signal path – almost always manually.
Until now, there has been no formalised, freely available tool to address this task, so test designers have often resorted to tools like whiteboards and spreadsheets, neither of which is ideal or designed for signal path design. It is precisely this gap, well-documented over years of work with customers, that Test System Architect addresses.
Test System Architect accelerates development by unifying configuration, schematic design, and cable definition into a single workflow. Connectivity is validated automatically. Documentation – such as BOMs, pin maps, and cable assemblies – is generated directly from the architecture. When upstream changes inevitably occur, the signal path design can be updated once, and outputs regenerate consistently. Acceleration, therefore, is not just about working faster – it is also about eliminating rework cycles that create bottlenecks. For test engineers worried about being the constraint in a new product introduction (NPI), predictability is very valuable.
eeNews Europe: When designing for ATE for production, what pitfalls are designers facing?
There are five major steps for designing an automated test system for production. The first step is defining system intent. Starting from a design team’s test spec, engineers identify required measurements and instruments. A common pitfall here is assuming full coverage without accounting for all the interstitial signals connecting components together – and living in emails, meetings, and whiteboards rather than a single documented environment. The warning sign: teams that “adjust requirements as they go” in the name of staying agile.
The second step is mapping components and the signal path. This involves defining pin endpoints and planning how instruments will be shared across devices under test. The inefficiency here is the widespread use of spreadsheets to describe a complex system – a difficult and error-prone way to collaborate and build an accurate signal path.
The third step is bringing things together – writing software, designing the fixture, and integrating hardware. Adding instruments at this stage can cause significant signal-path disruption, and nuances such as signal links, cabling, termination, and ground loops often surface here for the first time, causing software to behave differently than expected.
The fourth step is validation and troubleshooting. For critical industries like aerospace and life sciences, this step is non-negotiable. When cabling is undocumented or disorganised, point-to-point debugging becomes nearly impossible – leading some engineers to simply widen test limits to force a pass.
The fifth step is production and replication. Deploying systems across multiple sites demands a single locked-down source of truth for both design and signal path. Without it, any field failure becomes extremely difficult to diagnose or replicate. Each of these inefficiencies compounds the next, and a shortcut taken early becomes a very costly failure later.
eeNews Europe: How do tools such as System Configurator and Cable Design interact with each other within the Test System Architect platform?
In traditional test programs, system configuration, schematics, and cable drawings are separate efforts, often owned by different people using disparate tools. Test System Architect integrates these functions into a single project model. The System Configuration tool defines instrumentation and DUT (device-under-test) connections, providing the endpoints of a signal path. From there, the Schematic Design tool visually maps signal routing, switching, and connectivity between and across endpoints. Test System Architect then defines the cable harness based on the schematic. Because everything shares the same database, architectural changes propagate consistently. For production test teams, this means fewer translation errors between design and build. Test System Architect removes manual handoffs that cause late-stage delays.
eeNews Europe: Does Test System Architect allow for the easy integration of third-party instrumentation and DUTs?
Automated test systems on the factory floor tend to be from multiple vendors. Test System Architect represents third-party instrumentation alongside Pickering PXI and LXI hardware. DUTs are modelled directly, including signal requirements and connectivity. This ensures the entire signal chain, from DUT pin to measurement resource, is visible and validated early. The tool is entirely cloud-based and platform-agnostic.
eeNews Europe: What is the rationale for making Test System Architect a free, cloud-based resource and which sectors does it primarily target?
Pickering is primarily a hardware company, and Test System Architect is the most significant software release in our long history. Test System Architect will always be free of charge because we expect it to significantly improve the workflow of test engineers everywhere through wide-scale adoption, which may result in more sales of our modules. However, test engineers are free to use the tool without buying anything from Pickering.
For companies that prefer not to have their information on a public cloud, local versioning for private clouds will also be available.
In terms of sectors, industries where schedule pressure and system complexity intersect – such as aerospace, defence, and medical devices – will benefit most. But higher-volume industrial and automotive electronics are equally relevant, particularly where test architectures involve testing multiple devices under test in parallel. Those systems require sophisticated signal paths, which are ideally suited to the workflow inside Test System Architect. Ultimately, any test engineering department designing a custom production test system and routing a signal path manually is exactly the kind of team this tool was built for.
eeNews Europe: Looking ahead, what features is Pickering looking at in the next five years?
Test System Architect will continue to evolve to meet user requirements and new challenges. As a freely available cloud-based toolset, improvements and new functionality will be continually rolled out. Planned and potential enhancements include: ongoing backend data and user interface improvements, inclusion of AI-powered product selection, local versioning for private clouds, and simulated signal performance, including impedance and resistance calculations.
Pickering offers one of the largest ranges of PXI modules on the market, with over 1,500 products that are never made obsolete. The first PXI modules, produced more than 25 years ago, are still available today! This is critical for our customers, especially those with extended product lifecycles in aerospace, defence, medical devices, and public transportation.
Kyle Voosen is a test & measurement leader with more than 25 years’ experience spanning product strategy, go-to-market, and industry advocacy. As Product Marketing Manager at Pickering Interfaces, he is helping expand the company’s position beyond switching into broader signal-path and test system innovation. Previously, he held senior leadership roles at National Instruments, building expertise across modular hardware, software, and customer adoption. Kyle is also active in the wider test community through industry events, advisory work with emerging T&M ventures, and leadership within the PXI Systems Alliance. Originally from the United States and now based in the UK, he combines commercial strategy with technical depth to help engineers design and deploy complex test systems faster.
If you enjoyed this article, you will like the following ones: don't miss them by subscribing to :
此内容由惯性聚合(RSS阅读器)自动聚合整理，仅供阅读参考。 原文来自 — 版权归原作者所有。