Scout : advanced mass interconnect for pxi pxie

This is a general overview of MAC Panel’s PXI and PXIe based SCOUT advanced mass interconnect solutions. SCOUT is a PXI and PXIe based mass interconnect designed to deliver the full performance of PXI and PXIe ATE systems.

For more informations, contact Cotelec !

Hi i’m dave wilson, sales director for mac panel.
So what we’re going to look at in the short video is our scout product.
It’s a form of mass interconnect, so when you’re connecting from a test system to a unit being tested, you’ve got to somehow bridge that gap, and oftentimes that can be just a simple cable, but as the test gets more complex, or there are tighter technical requirements.
Then you need to look at a different approach.

And a mass interconnect system is a way of simply connecting reliably from the tester to the device that’s being tested.
All mass interconnect systems look very similar from the front.
So if you’re looking at a tester, you won’t know the type of mass interconnect system that it is.
But behind the scenes it’s very different.
In a more traditional mass interconnect approach, there are a multitude of cables behind.
Scout differs from that, by removing the vast majority of cables, and using pcbs or flex circuits or very very short cables in the system.

The core element of the scout approach, is a direct access kit, we call it a dac, for short, and it’s effectively an adapter, that goes from our module on the front of the system, back to the instrument, and it’s in multiple forms.
We have dax for over 700 different instruments.
So building a system, and even designing the system before that, is extremely straightforward.

A customer can attach any of our dacs to an instrument in five or ten minutes, and then can build a full system, in two three four hours.
I’m regularly asked what’s the biggest advantage of scout, and the answer :is it really depends on the customer.
Some customers need to build systems really quickly, so the modularity of scout really helps that.
Some customers have technical requirements that just can’t be met with cables, they might be taking really small voltage measurements, or they might be really concerned with signal integrity, and so our approach can overcome those technical issues.

Some customers just need to ensure that they build test systems that are the same as test systems that they built two three four five years ago, and with our approach it’s all modular and it makes that simple.
So all customers get all the benefits of scout all the time.
this is only a brief introduction to scout. for more information please visit our website.