SignalExpress TE is ideal for any design or test engineer looking for a more productive way to take interactive measurements on the benchtop. 
SignalExpress TE customers value the ease-of-use and the fast time to measurement provided by the drag-and-drop, non-programming user experience. 

Similar to comparing the productivity of LabVIEW versus ANSI-C for programming automated test and measurement applications, not all methods of performing interactive measurements are equally productive.  Below are some of the common bottlenecks when taking interactive measurements on the benchtop with traditional standalone instruments:

• Setting up and controlling multiple instruments
• Efficiently collecting, transferring, and analyzing "live" measurement data
• Correlating measured signals with simulation results
• Saving measurement and analysis configurations for future use

Fortunately, there are a variety of new tools and technologies, such as NI SignalExpress TE, to assist engineers with improving their productivity when taking interactive measurements on the benchtop.  Three key capabilities that NI has developed to assist in this area are:

• Providing the ability to control multiple instruments (from multiple vendors) from a single, interactive (non-programming) software environment
• Enabling live signal processing, analysis, and data storage using PC-based or existing benchtop instruments
• Providing precise side-by-side alignment and visualization of your measured and simulated waveforms

SignalExpress Tektronix Edition for Design Engineers

Interactive measurements are most common in design and validation applications.  Several key application areas for interactive measurements in design include verifying circuit prototypes, characterizing components and systems, and acquiring measurement data to develop behavior models for circuits used in EDA tools, such as Electronics Workbench Multisim. 

SignalExpress TE offers several key improvements for interactive measurements in design that reduces the amount of time spent in the labs.  One of these key areas is providing engineers with the tools to quickly perform advanced analysis on their incoming signals without requiring specialized equipment.  Many engineers must currently save their data to file on a floppy disk or USB stick and take the data back to their desk to perform detailed analysis on their measurement data.  Another key feature is removing a lot of the complexity of remembering how to operate a variety of different instruments by providing a consistent user interface for controlling multiple instruments and saving common configuration settings for each measurement.  Thirdly, a major time saving feature for today's design engineers is the ability to quickly correlate their live measurement results against the simulated SPICE results from their EDA tools.  This is one area that today's engineers have had to come up with creative workarounds to compare their measured and simulated results.  A common method of correlation is printing both waveforms and holding the overlaid sheets up to the light to accurately compare their measured results against the expected simulation results.

SignalExpress Tektronix Edition for Test Engineers

Interactive measurements are also critical in test applications for verifying measurements when developing a more sophisticated automated test application.  Test engineers also use interactive measurements to diagnose faulty connections and equipment in existing automated test systems in validation and manufacturing systems.  Furthermore, interactive measurements are used on repair benches in manufacturing to troubleshoot problems in manufacturing defects. 

One extremely important requirement for these applications is a fast time to measurement.  Engineers performing interactive measurements need to access their live measurements as quickly as possible which implies the need for a non-programmed measurement solution.  A big challenge that still exists today for engineers is performing more complex interactive measurements that require triggering and synchronization between multiple benchtop instruments without having to write a test program.  SignalExpress TE is an interactive measurement solution for today's engineers that addresses these three requirements and greatly increases the productivity of taking interactive measurements in test.

Measurement Software Comparisons

When controlling benchtop instruments from the PC, users typically had to choose from vendor provided freeware with limited instrument and analysis support or write their own measurement application.  SignalExpress provides a new option with an interactive environment that supports over 300 of the most common standalone instruments combined with advanced analysis, processing and reporting features.   

The following section details how NI SignalExpress TE compares to other Tektronix software offerings.

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Comparison to Tektronix Software