Adoption of commercial standards in an open system architecture for test system design

The Department of Defense is promulgating the use of commercial standards and open system principles with regard to ATE acquisitions. This paper describes a strategy being used to adopt commercial standards into a test system architecture based on open system principles. Technology specific ATS can be derived from this general ATS architecture and retain the benefits expressed at the general level. The architecture will promote costs savings in three areas: component interchangeability, Test Program Set (TPS) transportability, and test data exchange.