We, at Testonica have a deep and almost unbearable passion towards three things: FPGAs, testing and innovation.
These feelings have their roots in times preceding the official foundation of the company back in October 2005. That time, several fresh PhD graduates have decided to convert their academic R&D experience into industrial technologies and products that companies would desire to use. The challenge turned out to be very hard as the dreams were ambitious while commercial and industrial skills were missing. Still, the hard work and everyday learning by trial and error yielded their sweet fruits and made us finally see the great bright future coming.
The key technology in our portfolio is the Embedded Functional Test and Measurement Platform called Quick Instruments. It is the result of 10 years of uninterrupted experience in development of FPGA-based embedded instrumentation for production end of line testing addressing the needs of numerous dozens of small, large and very large sometimes very demanding customers. The solutions had to work immediately right from the shelf for products ranging from the simplest ones to the most advanced high-performance telecom and video processing equipment.
Our products and solutions had to stay at the technological cutting edge from the very beginning. The passion for innovation and friendly helping hand of our good friends at Goepel electronic paved the way to success in a very tough competition. Testonica was the first company that invented and brought to market Embedded Virtual Instrumentation as opposed to Synthetic Instruments offered back then by our competitors. Our key engineer has been granted a PhD degree for this breakthrough work, which is also protected by a patent. But seeing hundreds of happy technology users around the whole world is the best reward he and all of us at Testonica could only imagine.
Mastering Synthetic Instrumentation technology in the right way was our next challenge, which is nearly impossible. The industry is traditionally relying on FPGA-based test IP cores distributed in form of RTL code, encrypted IPs or even open-source public domain IPs. The solution vendor would then provide the customer with all necessary blocks to build and synthesize the final test bit-stream and control it via the JTAG bus. That requires the user to have FPGA development skills, licenses for FPGA tools, but most important it would shift the responsibility towards the success or failure in test solution bring-up to the customer.
At Testonica, we decided to make everything the other way around. The test engineer has to be able to handle the whole instrumentation synthesis system having no other knowledge but understanding the board netlist. We have to compile synthetic instruments on our back-end servers freeing the customer from the need to have respective FPGA development licenses. Said so, we started to build the industry first synthetic instruments' configuration and compilation cloud. Thanks to 10 years of industrial experience in FPGA-based production test we had by then developed a large in-house library of test and measurement instrumentation IPs as a solid basis for a fully automated system. After several years of development the cloud is now out for use. As a result, we are bearing full responsibly for the test quality by delivering a proven ready-to-use test solution.