Robust Growth
India has been witnessing a robust growth in the test and measurement space. This growth has been observed across all industry segments.

The wireless subscriber base in India is growing at the rate of about 40%. It has been observed in fast growing markets that the wireless growth rate is 3xGDP; so we can look forward to roughly 20% growth in India this fiscal. These growth rates are also an opportunity for leading international manufacturers to grow their market share, drive their top line, contribute to a healthy profit margin, and improve shareholder value.

Mobile growth has also caused many companies from related fields to expand, extend, and make forays into wireless product development.

India as a market offers critical mass and volumes to manufacturers to use their breadth and depth of product portfolio, especially products that cater to a large number of users, high-mid-low platform products covering varied users in urban-metro-rural areas.

The T&M market is expected to cater to the challenge of emerging complexities. Devices are getting complex and hence require elaborate testing. Many T&M companies have the widest range of products and the associated expertise available locally, to handle this challenge.

The challenge is to deliver voice, video and data services to residential customers over a single access point: telecommunications companies are adding IPTV to their portfolios, while cable operators are moving into telephony.

Although they use proven technologies to stake their claims, equipment manufacturers, cable companies, service providers, and network operators must learn how to handle the complexity of the infrastructures they need to deliver to the digital world their customers demand.

Technology has evolved from dedicated networks for different kinds of services to converged IP-based infrastructures that can transmit data, voice and video over a single pipe, in real time, to thousands of users.

The challenge lies in managing these conflicting demands reliably and efficiently, at acceptable cost, while providing the consumer with the quality of experience he has come to expect.

EMs, telcos and cable operators must validate their products under real-world conditions to be confident that they are able to handle complex voice, video and data services in real time, securely, for large user population.

Quality Concerns
Indian telecom operators are trying hard to meet the quality benchmarks stipulated by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI). The entire community of service providers is facing challenges posed by an unprecedented growth in subscribers, traffic volumes, and the inability to maintain QoS.

The TRAI performance indicators report for September 2007 does not give a rosy picture. According to the report, the wireline service providers have improved in parameters such as provision of telephones, call completion rate, shifts, percentage of calls answered electronically within 40 seconds, time taken for refunds of deposits during the quarter ended September 2007 as compared to the previous quarter.

However, the performance has deteriorated in this quarter, as compared to the previous quarter, in respect of fault incidents, faults repaired by next working day, mean time to repair, grade of service, metering and billing credibility, customer care services (closures and additional facilities), percentage of calls answered by the operator (voice to voice) within 60 seconds and 90 seconds.

According to TRAI, all cellular mobile service providers have achieved the prescribed TRAI benchmark in respect to six parameters: accumulated downtime of community isolation, call setup success rate, service access delay, call drop rate, percentage of calls answered (electronically) within 20 seconds, and the period of all refunds/payment due to customers from the date of resolution of complaints.

Performance has improved in this quarter as compared to the previous quarter in respect to parameters including TCH congestion, percentage of connections with good voice quality, percentage of calls answered (electronically) within 40 seconds, complaints per 100 bills issued, etc.

However, the performance has deteriorated in this quarter, as compared to the previous quarter, in areas such as SDCCH/paging channel congestion, percentage of calls answered by the operator (voice to voice); within 60 seconds, and percentage of calls answered by the operator (voice to voice) within 90 seconds.

Top Five Trends
Five trends that we anticipate will significantly influence the test and measurement industry over the next three years are as follows:

Explosion of Wireless Standards: Test engineers face new challenges as the use of RF and wireless applications is expanding. RF and wireless traditionally have been very specialized fields, but the industry is experiencing a trend where wireless capability is being integrated into more products.

Soon, RF instrumentation could become as ubiquitous as general-purpose instruments such as digital multimeters. This growth in adoption requires test engineers to learn wireless protocols and keep pace with the rapid introduction of new standards.

Among the top responses were WLAN and WiMax. A critical part of keeping up with these new technologies is a test platform that engineers can rapidly reconfigure to test any wireless standard.

Emulation-based ATE: As semiconductor devices become more complex, the process of testing each part completely with a traditional vector-based methodology is becoming increasingly difficult. Complex systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) and systems-in-a-package (SiPs) require a system-level functional test more closely related to testing components placed on a printed circuit board than a typical chip test, but they still require the high speeds demanded in production test for the semiconductor industry.

The strategy of testing a device by emulating real-world signals provides a better method of functional test for these types of high-speed systems. This emulation-based ATE combines FPGA-based hardware to offer real-time responses and real world interfacing with the standard pin electronics found in traditional ATE. This lowers the total cost of test and improves user ability to debug failures.

Increased Use of Multicore/Parallel Test Systems: To continue realizing performance gains without increased clock rates, processor manufacturers are developing processors with multiple cores on a single chip. With multicore processors, test engineers can develop automated test applications capable of achieving the highest possible throughput through parallel processing. To enable parallel processing, engineers traditionally had to learn complex constructs such as threading libraries to achieve parallel programming in a text-based programming language.

Growth of Software-defined Instrumentation: One issue facing test engineers is that test instrumentation is not updated as rapidly as the devices are tested. The functionality of these complex devices is being defined by the software embedded in them, such as most Smartphones, which gives design engineers the ability to add features faster than ever before. This is increasingly challenging for many test engineers because most stand-alone instruments often lack the measurement capabilities of the most recent standards due to the fixed user interface and firmware that must be developed and embedded in them.

Test engineers, thus, turn to software-defined approach to instrumentation, which gives them the ability to quickly customize their equipment and user interfaces to meet specific application needs and integrate testing directly into the design process, further reducing development time.

Growing Popularity: Another area experiencing rapid expansion in the test industry is the increase in system-level tools for field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). More manufacturers are including FPGAs on modular instruments and giving engineers the access in software to reprogram them according to their requirements. For example, test engineers can embed a custom algorithm into the device to perform in-line processing inside the FPGA or emulate part of the system that requires a real-time response.

New system-level tools are emerging that provide engineers with the ability to rapidly configure FPGAs without writing low-level VHDL code. LabVIEW, for example, can target onboard FPGAs and synthesize necessary hardware directly from a graphical LabVIEW program, dramatically reducing the complexity of code development. As electronic devices become more complex, testing will become more integrated in the design process and user-defined measurements will become even more important.

Roadblocks
Increase in spectrum for upcoming new applications is a key demand of operators. Bands should be allocated and vacated on time and should be auctioned for technology best suited. Policymakers should not decide, and spectrum should be available in a timely manner to empower operators to use spectrum.

Customers care for early access to fast growing markets and adoption of cutting edge technologies. Many educational and R&D customers are working on leading edge technologies like WiMax, 3G, PP, HSDPA, and HSUPA. These R&D efforts culminate in the use of high-end T&M products.

High-volume manufacturers care for cost of total test and cost of ownership. These are the factors that manufacturers worry about and so have shifted their thought in evaluating suppliers on the basis of boxes to looking at total cost-effective solutions. In addition, many major contract manufacturers have invested in scalable manufacturing setup, eyeing growth-related orders expected in the next six months.

Growth of the cellular market being understood as given, to cater to the handset and cellular infrastructure volume, all major manufacturers would resort to utilizing the production facilities to full capacity, thus fuelling the growth of the T&M industry. This will also help major manufacturers to improve their profitability and reduce the risk of not wanting to ramp up their in-house manufacturing ahead of the market demands and low returns on investments.

The telecom sector will continue to see some paradigm shifts happening in the Apac region as the communications segment is the most price sensitive given the fact that the margins are thin in the manufacturing segment. ARPUs are the lowest in a fast growing country like India and value added services are yet to take off, thus, not providing much headroom for realizing the return on investments quick enough.

A number of companies are playing in the T&M field with varying degrees of competitiveness; price plays a major role for low- and mid-range products while performance and capabilities drive the growth of high-endproducts.

The communications industry has been a driving force in the worldwide T&M market, and the Asia Pacific region is seeing a more rapid CAGR than other regions. This trend is likely to continue for the next five-six years, and India's rapid development in this space can be counted on to sustain this trend.

Baburajan K
baburajank@cybermedia.co.in