Embedded synthetic instruments for O-level test: Modular IO and FPGA technology provide increased flexibility and decreased cost of test

System complexity in the aerospace, defense, and automotive industries continues to increase. This puts demand on test engineers to produce novel solutions that decrease the cost of testing system components. Moving forward, these engineers will be faced with the difficulties of maintaining an increasing volume of legacy hardware while simultaneously developing solutions to test new technologies. Software-designed synthetic instruments are a fairly new way of tackling this challenge, however this technology has mainly been applied to larger, depot and intermediate level testers.