The Problem
A manufacturer of DVD players required calibration of one of the amplifier prior to assembly into the final product. The cost of including an auto-calibration circuit within the amplifier was deemed to be impractical, as it would raise the cost of good beyond the acceptable level.

Manufacturing engineering proved the concept of calibrating this amplifier by measuring the output signal using a digital oscilloscope and varying the gain by adjusting a digital trim-pot on the board, all under full programmatic control.

The time it took to acquire data using a GPIB-controlled oscilloscope was deemed to be unacceptably high, as it reduced the production throughput, thereby increasing the cost of manufacturing.

The Solution
The customer purchased an ATS850 waveform digitizer board from AlazarTech to evaluate in his own environment.  The customer was able to quickly verify that the ATS850 would suit their application perfectly.

The oscilloscope-like features of the ATS850, such as programmable input ranges from 5mV/div to 5V/div, programmable AC/DC coupling, programmable 1MW/50W impedance, programmable on-board acquisition memory and simple-to-use triggering made it easy to replace the oscilloscope with an ATS850.  And the PCI bus data throughput offered by the ATS850 (>20 MB/s as compared to 10 KB/s offered by GPIB) helped the customer achieve his goal of testing the required number of units per hour.

The customer had a choice of purchasing other PC based digitizers on the market, but those were found to be too expensive, whereas the customer's capital equipment budget for the test system could only afford a maximum of $1,000 price for the waveform digitizer.  Once again, the AlazarTech solution won hands down.

The final concern the customer had was QoS (Quality of Signal).  Even though the customer could not afford to pay a high price for the digitizer, he was not willing to compromise the quality of the digitized signal.  The ATS850 satisfied the customer with its 42 dB SNR at 4 MHz and very low chattering noise.  In fact, the customer discovered that the ATS850 performed even better than the written specifications.

The customer undertook a software development project to incorporate the ATS850 into the test software already developed in the proof of concept stage.  This project also went very smoothly, thanks to the easy to use Application Programming Interface (API) offered by the ATS850 Software Development Kit (SDK).

Conclusion
The customer adopted the ATS850 as the waveform digitizer in the manufacturing test stand with minimal costs and was able to meet the product requirements well within the capital budget allocated by the program manager.