TEST & MEASUREMENT HANDBOOK
The Eclypse Z7 board looks like an FPGA board but harnesses the open I/O standard called SYZYGY.
Work-at-home instrumentation The rise in social distancing has fostered a need for professionalgrade test instruments that function as well at home as in the lab.
THE EVENTS
that have unfolded
across the world since the beginning of 2020 have turned the global marketplace upside down. Few industries have felt this seismic shift as much as engineering, where companies and their employees have traditionally spent much of their time working in a hands-on capacity with numerous pieces of equipment in curated lab spaces and workbenches. The same is true for those electrical engineering students and professors that are being forced out of their comfort zones as well.
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DESIGN WORLD — EE NETWORK
As engineers and students are reluctantly being asked to move those workspaces to their homes, the question remains: Is this a temporary solution or something that can be permanent? The truth is, innovations in athome labs for engineering, flipped classrooms, and online work capacity in recent years have added the ability to serve more engineers, novice and experienced, without increasing the lab space. Whether or not they are having a consistent experience with their test and measurement equipment remains a separate question altogether. Even before COVID-19 and its resulting fallout, engineering companies and universities were increasingly asked to support more while remaining under budget, tasking engineers, 6 • 2020
DAVID HORN | DIGILENT
and academics to make more out of less. One of the most sought-after resource needs in engineering, besides time, is laboratory space, which happens to be an advantage of Digilent’s portable test and measurement devices. The introduction of portable test and measurement devices has added engineering to the list of jobs that can be done fully or partially remote. Scenes of engineers having to take their turns in a secured laboratory for every measurement are becoming less and less frequent. Engineers are constantly asked to produce more, faster, requiring them to adapt and innovate to minimize their design cycle time, all while still meeting strict design requirements. Devices on the desk that could allow engineers to work from home or remotely eeworldonline.com
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