any people are surprised and frustrated when they buy a new card for their computer or cellular phone: They take it home, and the device fails to work.
Fifty-three years into the age of solid-state electronics, we have come to expect nothing less than absolute reliability from the hardware powering the computer revolution. And it's rare indeed that this respect is ill-founded: Compared to software such as Microsoft Windows, or even Linux, computer hardware is astonishingly reliable.
This reliability has been accompanied by ever-plummeting prices. A decade ago, an Ethernet network card for a desktop personal computer could cost $350 or more - and the cards frequently didn't work.
I remember very clearly a stack of 10-megabit-per-second (Mbps) cards that I had on my desk in 1990: Each card was there because it had worked in one computer but failed in another.
Today you can buy a 100-Mbps card for $19, and there is little doubt that when you drop it into your computer, it will work.
This new age of highly reliable hardware is a result of more stringent controls in the plants where silicon chips are made and more exact specifications and standards for the completed systems. But it's also the result of better equipment for testing the microelectronics before they are assembled into a piece of consumer electronics.
Indeed, more than ever before, test equipment is an essential part of the modern economy, its manufacturers some of our great unsung heroes.
One of the leaders in the field of test equipment is Teradyne Inc. - yes, the same Teradyne whose headquarters is in that big white building on Harrison Avenue, a few blocks from South Station. Inside that building, Teradyne builds the Catalyst tester.
As I walked through the factory on Harrison Street, I saw dozens of the machines in various states of assembly. Each machine is built in its own room, with the name of the customer and the expected ship date written on the door.
Costing between $500,000 and $2 million and weighing a little more than a ton, the Catalyst is designed specifically for testing electronic devices that combine both analog and digital components - for example, a chip inside an Ethernet card, or on the circuit board that's attached to a hard disk drive. The Catalyst isn't used to test microprocessors or memory chips.
Testing a chip takes just a few seconds. Usually a robotic arm will pick up the chip and place it on top of the circular testing assembly. The tester then applies power to the chip and injects a series of test signals. A computer controls the whole process and monitors how the chip being tested performs.
Besides making a simple good or bad decision, the test might conclude that the chip is good enough for some applications (or some customers), but not good enough for others.
What makes the Catalyst special is the wide range of test signals that it can apply to the device that's being tested. Depending on how it is configured, the Catalyst can provide more than 100 volts of power and radio frequency signals across the entire spectrum to the device being scrutinized. The machine also can send and receive data to the test device at the rate of up to 400 megabits per second - considerably faster than even the fastest Pentium microprocessor.
The whole thing is controlled by a clock that is accurate to within a few hundred picoseconds (or a ten-billionth of a second). The key to this flexibility, explained Jeff Schneider, a marketing manager at the company, is custom-built integrated circuits that were designed specifically for use in this equipment.
The day I visited Teradyne I saw a Catalyst that was set up to test chips used in cellular telephones. The machine was testing four chips at a time. A complete test involved 350 individual tasks, and took roughly four seconds.
If you want to learn to use a Catalyst, Teradyne offers a three-week training course. Interestingly enough, the main thrust of the course is programming and simulation. The programming is essential, since a different program needs to be custom-designed for every different device that is to be tested. The simulation part of the course teaches engineers how to test devices before they actually exist by simulating both the device and how it will react to the proposed test. According to Schneider, many of Teradyne's customers actually find problems with their chip designs when they test the simulations, before anything is committed to silicon.
Teradyne started shipping the Catalyst in July 1997; a new version is expected to ship later this year that will be faster and more powerful - just the thing for testing those new high-speed chips. As sales of these things go, the machine has been quite successful: more than 300 have shipped, and Teradyne has orders for at least 400 more. The Internet is the key thing driving sales. ''Over 70 percent of our revenues is coming from Internet-related issues,'' says Teradyne vice president Thomas B. Newman Jr.
So the next time that you buy a card and plug it into your computer, sure that it's going to work, think for a moment about the tremendous amount of technology that went into not only creating the device, but testing it, so that it would work for you.
Technology Columnist Simson Garfinkel can be reached at http://chat.simson.net/
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