Test and Measurement News

Prism Sound’s dScope makes field testing easy for AKM’s engineers 

San Jose, CA – February 2006:  The Californian branch of Japanese manufacturer  AKM Semiconductor has significantly improved its customer service ratings by equipping its applications engineers with Prism Sound dScope Series III audio test and measurement tools.

The company, which supplies mixed-signal integrated circuits for audio, video, networking and wireless communications, strives to provide the best customer service in the semiconductor industry. By equipping its engineers with Prism Sound dScopes, AKM can diagnose and solve problems much more quickly, thus reducing the risk of delaying a customer’s program schedule.

Richard Kulavik, AKM’s Manager of Marketing and Applications Engineering, says: “Before we acquired the Prism Sound dScope III audio test systems, it was not practical for our applications engineers to travel with test gear, as the alternative was much too large and bulky to fit into the limited overhead bin space available on most aircraft. Now that we have the dScopes, we are able to show up at our customer's site with more productive test equipment than ever before.  This enables our engineers to diagnose and solve problems associated with our parts, therefore helping our customers to significantly reduce their time to market. The ability to use our own test equipment at the customer's site is the key to debugging circuits quickly and effectively, ensuring AKM provides a valuable and efficient service to its customers.”
 
Kulavik adds that Prism Sound’s dScope III also allows AKM to perform very deep FFTs, looking into the noise floor and finding the exact frequency that could be causing the problem. 

“With the time domain and frequency domain plots simultaneously displayed we can see problems significantly faster than before,” he says. “The other key feature that helps us diagnose problems fast is the ability to see multiple test values at once.  For example, we can view Amplitude, phase, THD+N, scope view and the FFT on one screen.  We can do all of this and see both channels of data simultaneously. By viewing multiple signals and analysis at once, we are able to speed up the resolution of support issues tremendously.”

Prism Sound’s dScope is suitable for a wide range of digital and analogue audio applications and is used in many market sectors including broadcast, multimedia, CD, DVD, computer audio, transducer, digital telephony and communications. It is comprehensive and accurate for R&D, portable and intuitive for maintenance and field service, and fast, automatic and IT-friendly for the production line.

As well as being an extremely valuable field test equipment box, the dScope III is also proving invaluable in AKM’s lab.  “It's speed and performance allows us to test all of our demo boards very quickly,” Kulavik adds.