Test & Measurement Voice of Customer Insights (English)

Driven by the ever-increasing pace of innovation, design engineers are under pressure to evaluate performance and troubleshoot their designs—faster than ever. Using it to perform more than half of their tasks, test and measurement equipment allows design engineers to quickly validate their designs by simulating real-world conditions. 

But what challenges are design engineers experiencing? How can innovation in the test and measurement arena deliver insights faster, more precisely, and under more rigorous conditions?

To find out, we interviewed over 250 electrical, mechanical, and other types of design engineers. With over 70% having more than 10 years’ professional experience, we were able to derive five critical insights revealing the latest test and measurement trends, challenges, and requirements across the aerospace, automotive, defense, industrial equipment, medical, semiconductor, and wireless communications industries.

Respondents predict that autonomous driving, the internet of things, and electric vehicles will have the greatest impact on test and measurement protocols, followed by evolving 5G technologies and applications.

But as demand drives innovation, survey participants cite testing complexity, finding the right hardware components, and a spike in costs as their biggest challenges. Design engineers are looking to the test and measurement industry to come up with answers to help them to do their jobs faster and more efficiently while ensuring higher quality.

To help them achieve that, engineers would like test and measurement innovations to focus on gathering more data at speed, managing and optimizing signal integrity, and providing remote connectivity for simplifying data transfer and accelerating time-to-insights.

But it’s not just about data input and output. The respondents also want to see significant improvements in the test and measurement equipment itself.

Almost all participants cited measurement stability and accuracy as the most important requirement for test and measurement tasks, followed by hardware reliability, signal integrity, electromagnetic compatibility and interference performance, and processing speed.

And with only a relatively small proportion of currently deployed test and measurement equipment requiring wireless connectivity, the drive for accelerated insights requires all future tools to be enabled with some form of advanced wireless communications.

At TE, we’re meeting the challenge. We’re helping fuel innovation and empower design engineers by delivering the technology and components required by test and measurement equipment vendors to accelerate time-to-insights.