NI has acquired German company SET Gmbh, boosting its portfolio in power semiconductor reliability systems for automotive.

NI paid cash for the company, which is based in Wangen, Germany, and financial terms were not disclosed; SET’s approximately 100 employees will be joining NI.

NI had an existing investment in SET; in 2020, it took a minority stake in the company and collaborated with SET to improve what NI described as a “system-on-demand and model-based test approach” with reduced risk and faster time-to-market that optimized data and assets. NI said that collaboration (specifically focused on aerospace and defense customers in commercial aviation, space launch vehicle and urban air mobility) will continue.

While NI described SET as “long-standing experts in aerospace and defense test system development,” it’s SET’s more recent work in semiconductors for automotive that was of particular interest.

“SET has been innovating on new capabilities in the emerging automotive supply chain area of power semiconductors since before NI’s initial partnership in 2020,” NI explained, adding that the company’s “participation in cross-industry and academic forums on reliability test techniques has made significant contributions to the understanding of electric vehicle applications for power semiconductors.”

“The automotive supply chain is going through a transformation where both OEMs and semiconductor players are rapidly innovating on new technologies. The ability to adequately specify and predict how these new technologies behave inside new Electric Vehicles is critical for performance and safety,” said Ritu Favre, EVP and GM of NI business units. “SET is a clear innovator in this area as well as an established provider in Avionics testing. NI is a global leader in automated test and measurement systems. By combining capabilities, NI and SET can offer more differentiated solutions to customers and grow together by leveraging NI’s global scale.”

In other test news:

-Analytics, planning and optimization company Teoco has acquired a RF propagation/3D ray-tracing model from Wavecall, and Wavecall’s founder and CEO, Dr. Karim Rizk, will be joining Teoco’s network analytics team. Teoco said that Wavecall’s WaveSight model “has advanced capabilities to manipulate large areas of high-resolution GIS data sets, as well as support for creation of rapid visual representation”. This furthers TEOCO’s commitment to evolve its RF planning capabilities to enable operators to create and leverage digital twin models of their network” and that the acquisition supports Teoco’s goal of enabling operators to create and leverage digital twins of their networks.

“This acquisition in an investment in transforming our RF planning capabilities and to move deeper into the digital twin space,” said Atul Jain, founder and CEO of Teoco.

–Viavi Solutions introduced a new high-speed, multi-port Ethernet testing platform at OFC 2023 this week that supports up to 128 x 800G. The company also announced that its TM500 and TeraVM test solutions have been chosen to outfit Auray’s open testing and integration center (OTIC) and security lab in Kaohsiung City, Taiwan and support end-to-end testing and validation. Viavi noted that Auray’s OTIC is the first of its kind in Taiwan to be approved by the O-RAN Alliance; Viavi is involved in testing at a number of OTICs around the world via a joint solution with Rohde & Schwarz.

–Keysight Technologies touted a successful demonstration with McGill University of world-record 1.2 Tbps and 1.6 Tbps O-band coherent transmissions operating over 10 kilometers, using distributed feedback lasers (DFBs) for both the carrier and local oscillators. The demo system, according to the test company, used Keysight’s M8199B 256 GSa/s Arbitrary Waveform Generator, which delivers 75 gigahertz of bandwidth, plus a thin-film lithium niobate I/Q modulator with 100 gigahertz of bandwidth and a Keysight Infiniium UXR-Series oscilloscope (110 GHz, 256 GSa/s).

“Pushing coherent technologies into the O-band is essential for its future, ubiquitous use in data centers. Our record 1.6 Tbps O-band coherent transmission with Canada’s McGill University is a key milestone towards this goal,” said Dr. Joachim Peerlings, Keysight’s VP of network and data center solutions. “The continued proliferation of AI requires new levels of server and network performance that must scale computing resources within reasonable energy bounds. This result is a milestone for the industry moving towards greener data centers.” 

–Open XR Forum said that it enabled the successful demonstration of long-haul point-to-point transmission between QSFP56-DD coherent transceivers over 1,400 km at 400 Gb/s using 16 QAM modulation, and error-free performance at 300 Gb/s using 8QAM modulation over a span of 2,495 km. That level of performance is equal to or greater than current state-of-the-art transceivers, according to the forum, which also said that this was the first published demonstration of “an advanced management method that enables management and control of optical transceiver functions independently from the host equipment.” The demonstration involved Lumen Technologies using Infinera’s ICE-XR 400G QSFP56-DD transceivers operating in third-party routers and transmitting over third-party line systems.

“This management decoupling of key transceiver functions from host routing functions is a new and easily generalized method for integration and management of coherent transceivers in any host device, including routers, switches, and servers,” Open XR Forum explained. “The ability to separate management of IP and optical functions better aligns with existing service provider operational models, helping resolve a key barrier for deployment of IP over [dense wavelength-division multiplexing, or DWDM].”