RF Switch Matrix/Signal Conditioning Challenge: Reverse Engineering And Updating Your Legacy Test System

This is the third in a series of guest columns by Bob Alman of SenarioTek.

Almost every company has an old test system in the corner of their lab that provides a test capability that they require. Perhaps it is related to a government program or a commercial product line that has been around forever. Sometimes the system has been mothballed and they need to get it to run again.

Often these old or legacy systems have little or no documentation. The people who designed and built them either retired or left the company years ago. The test engineers today know how to use the system but may have little knowledge about how it was built.

For a variety of reasons, these legacy systems can become critical bottlenecks to the business. In some cases, the test engineers might need to start a new test system platform project to replace the entire legacy system. However, tight budget and timeline constraints often put the pressure on making do with the legacy system. Because these additional constraints complicate the decisions and the implementation of system development, project definition, resource planning, and scheduling become important factors in the legacy system planning phase.