Ultra low cost linear testing

The advent of high quality PC based instruments, combined with the normal day to day skills of linear test engineers, eliminates the need for general purpose linear testers in many cases. Linear applications are dominated by custom DUT boards; therefore a few application card tricks and some PC instruments can replace the general purpose linear tester and significantly reduce cost and size without sacrificing performance. This paper explores one example of a simple PC instrument based tester for an industry standard Op Amp, and then examines how one might package the solution into a parallel multi-site test solution.