Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1424540
NOVEMBER 2021 I SMT007 MAGAZINE 81 which allows you to focus on your core competencies and core value add. You want to leverage com- petencies from others. at's part of the trick and everybody is learn- ing that for their busi- ness at this point. What we're trying to do is to help them on that jour- ney, and frankly, we're taking the journey our- selves and learning. Near term, we want to make sure our cus- tomers are successful now. But at the same time, we want to raise the bar in a big way, long term. We are try- ing to pick and choose where we fit and where we can add value to our customers. We feel the right formula for us to do this is to leverage the data science and computational power avail- able today with our domain expertise. Now, we can't do that in every domain. We already talked to some customers and said, "Well, maybe we don't have the domain ex- pertise. Maybe you do or somebody else does." ey've asked if they can use our platform. We said, "Yes, and there are also all these other platforms you can use." ere's a lot available, so the best thing is to experiment and learn to accelerate the process. Keep in mind what you are trying to improve and are you measuring it? Are you really improving? A lot of people are playing with the tools and a lot of people can do data analytics. But when we find anomalies and you ask the data scien- tists what the anomaly means, they would say, "I don't know, you tell me." Johnson: I think that analysis is the area to have the most innovation in the future. Cain: Yes. When we designed this massively par- allel platform, we made sure that it plugged and played very nicely with both physical automa- tion and data analytics automation. We also le the choice open on what people want to make massively parallel; we pur- posely chose sub-assem- blies' capabilities that we knew were very scalable. While we did some our- selves, like the intercon- nect or what we called the switch fabric be- tween the test fix- ture to the system, we le some open to the users by providing a PXI infrastructure in the form of a PXI chassis in the system. It's a standardized interface that is scalable in terms of the measurement. ere are multiple types of instruments available, in- cluding the i7090 measurement card itself, which we designed to fit into a 3U PXI module. Johnson: Test and inspection is seen as a neces- sary evil, a cost of doing business, not as a con- tributor to the profit margins in any way. How is Keysight turning that around so that cus- tomers see this as an investment that returns and adds to their margin? Cain: You must not become a bottleneck in the workflow if you try to apply a traditional board test system that can test up to four boards at once: "On these units that are lower complex- ity but higher volume, they may be built on a panel of 64. Can you test those four at a time?" "Yeah, absolutely, that's no problem." We had a case where a customer had something like that, and it was taking 120 seconds to test. On our massively parallel program, it took less than 20 seconds. Instead of having a bunch of testers per line, now you need, maybe one, for multiple lines,