The test and measurement industry produces instruments for analyzing electronic and mechanical systems. It constantly develops to adapt to technological advances, providing both general-purpose and specialized instruments for high-tech industries. The industry strives for increased accuracy and provides tools for measuring complex systems, including oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, audio and optical measurement devices. The industry is trending towards software packages to organize collected data.
The test and measurement industry focuses on the production of instruments used to analyze, validate, and verify measurements of electronic and mechanical systems. Due to the growing need for higher precision and high definition measurements, the instruments involved in this area are constantly developing to adapt to technological advances in the sectors they serve. The test and measurement industry creates both general-purpose instruments and highly specialized instruments and caters primarily to the high-tech industrial, automotive, communications, and medical electronics industries.
There is a scientific principle that a perfect measurement can never be achieved because the measurement process will always change in at least a few minutes of measurement the object being measured. The test and measurement industry, however, is not deterred by this principle as it constantly strives for ever-increasing accuracy to accommodate the increased use of microtechnology and increasingly complex systems. In addition to a quantitative increase in accuracy, industry is also providing tools for measuring things otherwise too complex to measure with other tools.
A common tool used in this industry is the oscilloscope, used to measure and graph voltages. More recently, a larger tool has been developed: the logic analyzer, which measures and displays signals on a digital circuit and is capable of analyzing systems with more channels than the oscilloscope.
While many test and measurement instruments are electronic in nature, the industry also provides high-definition audio and optical measurement devices. Optical devices range from the more familiar microscopes to more complex spectrometers that measure and graph values such as light intensity and polarization. Audio tools range from highly sensitive microphones to audio analyzers that graphically represent various attributes of audio signals.
Due to the growing complexity of the necessary measurements, the industry has recently started a rapid trend towards software packages. These packages work with test and measurement devices to encode, validate, and organize the data they collect. Software packages are most commonly provided to accompany devices, which perform the more complicated measurements and provide a large amount of data that needs to be organised.
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