How does the test and measurement industry embrace digital transformation opportunities in the post-pandemic era?

For the grasp of cutting-edge trends, the perception of test and measurement manufacturers is usually more sensitive. Because from research and development, prototype verification to actual production, the work of test and measurement is required to run through it. Now test and measurement manufacturers are no longer just instrument vendors, but enablers of industry solutions. Zheng Jifeng, general manager of Keysight’s Greater China market, believes that as a company in the testing and measurement industry, it cannot be said that it is ahead of the development of certain industries, but it must be developing closely with the industry. In many scenarios of digital transformation driven by the epidemic, Keysight Technology participated in the whole process, thinking and exploring the possibilities and directions of the future together with different industry leaders and partners. At the same time as the Keysight World held recently, Keysight held an online media communication meeting, and several speakers gave wonderful sharing.

The future teaching method of “full life cycle” integrating device and cloud

For test and measurement manufacturers, the education industry is inseparable. From the training of ordinary college students to the support of cutting-edge scientific research projects, the participation of test and measurement manufacturers is required. In recent years, the epidemic has pushed the entire education industry to switch to online teaching. But in fact, for EE courses, there are a lot of experiments, which often require a variety of different equipment for field operations, and repeated input and output adjustments, real-time observation of output effects, these are still difficult to solve in pure online teaching. question. It is reported that Keysight has conducted some remote experiments with Tsinghua University during the epidemic, and has collected feedback from all over the world.

According to the market research results conducted by Keysight and its partners: 10% of education practitioners believe that they should return to mainstream offline teaching after the epidemic, because offline communication between people is indispensable; 20 % of education practitioners believe that they should migrate online as much as possible; the vast majority, 70% of education practitioners, believe that the future will be a balanced online and offline hybrid education model, that is, “full life cycle” teaching method. This teaching method will not only be in college, but will cover the entire process of future professional development. “The transmission of such information to Keysight has also inspired us to think about the entire education industry and our related product lines.” Li Jian, Manager of Government and Service Marketing, Keysight Greater China, shared, “Yes DeTech has also launched a series of new educational programs.”

The first is the “Smart Bench Essentials Series”, which is a hybrid distance teaching program for basic electronics and electrical engineering teaching in universities. “We have carried out a transformation of the entire system, especially the entire network system and control system, including the control system of our workbench, have changed, and a hybrid model can be formed. The original method continues to be retained, but our The client can access the laboratory through the cloud. Whether the client is a laboratory manager, a lecturer, a substitute teacher or a classmate, it can actually enter such a central laboratory through remote access. This time we launched such a solution because traditional solutions cannot actually meet such a so-called cloudification, a remote teaching system. Therefore, in order to meet such a demand, we have specially launched a series of hardware and Software products. Hardware products include oscilloscopes, multi-function signal generators, multi-function meters, and high-power power output. There is also a control platform called Bench View, which connects the entire workbench, laboratory, and management server to Take control to form a complete system,” shared Li Jian.

As shown in the figure below, in the middle is a central laboratory; on the left is a server for laboratory management, which also acts as a gateway server to undertake the access of external clients; on the right is a number of different workbenches, and the workbench includes four major Hardware equipment and Bench View platform. Keysight has also specially designed a multi-function switching matrix function to ensure that students can get an experience similar to offline manual wiring online – each signal of the DUT can be connected to the test through an automatically configurable switching matrix. system, so that a combination of multiple experimental projects can be realized remotely.

It is worth mentioning that the Keysight Smarter Teaching System is an open platform. The hardware layer, the middle layer and the access layer are properly separated and designed. Other interfaces are open, and teachers can perform secondary operations on it. This actually improves the expansibility of the entire platform and gives teachers more possibilities for course customization.

Seamless connection, resilient network

According to Bai Ying, Manager of the Wireless Marketing Department of Keysight Technologies Greater China, 5G will still and will play a very important role in the development of mobile communications in the next five to ten years. There will be three significant changes in mobile communications.

The first is network modernization: a huge benefit of softwareization is that mobile operators can expand coverage according to real-time needs, and at the same time can flexibly and organize network configuration. In the future, the network will continue to develop in the direction of software, virtualization and openness.

The second is the emergence of new application scenarios and business models: from Release16 to Release17, the new functions of 5G are further enhanced; more spectrum and bandwidth are allocated, and at the same time, non-terrestrial network connection services are proposed, such as NTN; At the same time, it is proposed to further strengthen the standard formulation of connected vehicles. 5G actually increases the data transfer rate at the “edge” and unlocks more scenarios. Different from the new scenarios that everyone understands, it is not just AR and VR. Many traditional businesses that are not related to ordinary mobile communications, such as retail, finance, manufacturing, logistics, etc., will be effectively promoted by 5G. There are opportunities to be explored for entrepreneurs to innovate business models and forms.

The third is the pre-research and infrastructure construction of 6G: the real physical world and the virtual world are connected through machines or even ordinary PCs, thus forming the interconnection between humans, machines and the virtual world – the real IoE (Internet of Everything) . This will place new requirements on the network. For example, the network needs to have self-organization capabilities, the network needs to have virtualization functions, and virtual machines can help with maintenance, monitoring, and upgrades. With the gradual development of the Release18 work, the theoretical research, physical design and waveform design of 6G will be carried out in great strides.

As the network evolves to become faster and more seamless, security issues will also become more important. Because network security will not be limited to a single person, but will be related to the organization, company, and even government agencies that this person is associated with. So this puts a requirement on the network to be resilient, and this is another opportunity that Keysight sees. Bai Ying said, how to prevent, how to ensure that the network has a certain elasticity, and at the same time the network must be able to achieve self-monitoring, self-repair, and be able to stress test its own network vulnerabilities, this is another dimension of the problem . With the integration of ICT technologies, 5G network security is no longer a purely IT issue, but a comprehensive ICT issue. Therefore, before thinking about the next business strategy and how to ensure the success of business, such as Detech and other network partners, we must first consider how to build a flexible network organization that can effectively prevent or ensure network security. On the basis of the integration of technology, it will further develop.

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In addition to the two major opportunities mentioned above, with the increase in data rate, the era of big data generated by massive data contains new opportunities: including the era of cloud economy, the rise of PAM4 and coherent optics, the battle for new digital interface standards, Edge computing, etc., Keysight also has corresponding solutions for layout. In addition, in the cutting-edge quantum computing field, Keysight Technology has also started its layout as early as 2016. It has acquired Signadyne, Labber and Quantum Benchmark successively. At present, it can realize quantum error correction, quantum suppression, quantum optimization, and commercialize quantum computing. The basic layout is done.