Most engineers in the world have used a piece of Tektronix equipment at some stage in their career, and this has made Tektronix one of the leading test equipment makers in the world, with divisions focussing on logic analysers, video test, communications test and signal sources.

Rick Wills took over as Chairman and CEO in 2000, after 20 years with the company, and he sees Europe as a key part of the company's growth, particularly in testing communication systems. The majority of the company's business is outside the US, and a large part of that is down to the focus on the comms business.
"Sixty per cent of our business come from outside the US," he said. "Russia is one of the fastest growing regions right now, and Europe plays a key role for Tektronix. We sold our first product in Europe in 1948 to Ericsson and they have been our customer for 50 years."
Other customers include the leading technology companies such as Intel, Motorola, Cisco, Texas Instruments, Nokia, Verizon, Siemens, and Nortel.
"While these customers are very important to Tektronix' strategy, there are also many other customers including Lockheed Martin, Sony, Raytheon, Boeing, and the US government. In fact, the diversity of our customer base provides excellent stability during difficult economic times," he said.
This is a key part of the company strategy, working with the large players early on, knowing what their roadmap is and having the test technology in place in time to test those new developments, whether they are new processors, new communications equipment, protocols or networks, says Wills.
This also allows the company to predict future growth. "We know what our customers are spending on research and development and we have formulae to predict what's going to happen," he said.
"A year ago we were looking at this and we felt that it would be another year or so before the markets took off. We believe the recovery will be a phased recovery, and we are seeing growth in some sectors of communications, computing and semiconductors," he said.

Logic analysers

This has helped Tektronix strengthen its position in logic analysers, says Wills. "We are number two but close to being number one, which comes from working with companies such as Intel, where we see their roadmap for the next couple of years so we can provide the technology they need to validate their chips when they come out."
In the video test market, the company has a 44 per cent market share, while it is the number one player in mobile protocol test, says Wills. Coupled with this, one of the major areas of growth is communications, particularly 3G networks.
"I think there's a number of challenges facing wireless communications systems over the next five years," said Wills. "There was a hype phase to the next generation of wireless communications and we are through that hype now and the technology looks much more promising then a few years ago."
With 3G networks now becoming reality, there are issues with both the roll out of the technology and the backwards compatibility with existing GSM and GPRS mobile phone networks.
"The technology has improved quite a bit in the last12 months, but it's a very complex situation," he said. "There are multiple vendors and multiple standards in systems that are very, very complex moving from 2G to 2.5G and 3G. This is a fundamental change, and for us that's great news. Where there's complexity, that's where our protocol group in Berlin comes in. We have access to over 800 standards - across hardware interfaces, across vendors and across technologies."
Even when there is a standard, there are different versions from different suppliers, he says, and this makes it hard to produce test equipment that will serve all the suppliers.
"The test companies operators and equipment manufacturers have to work more closely together, as each equipment manufacturer has some slight variant that needs to be understood," he said. "A key part of the business is working with the operators across all the vendors and standards to help verify the complete systems. In such a competitive environment you have to be the external standard of approval and help people find the problems."
That is where the close relationships are vital, but that brings its own problems when working with multiple companies on sensitive development plans.
"We have to be close to the vendors during the development phase - they can't bring us in at the end of the day, it has to be when they are developing the sub-systems - but we also have to keep firewalls between the people and the intellectual property for all those different vendors," he said.
The product plans have also evolved as the communications market has changed. "If we go back a year or two the majority of sales were to the equipment vendors, but now55 to 60 per cent are sales from operators as it's being deployed," he said. "That's why we developed a handheld field tester for basestation testing."
"The design of that product has to be very simple - two years ago we interviewed the operators to find out what their needs and frustrations were and we found there were tools that had evolved from the lab, so instead we developed a ruggedised handheld. For that we had to 'strive for adequacy', and not put a bunch of features in that technicians didn't care about."
Tektronix has also brought its experience with logic analysers to the communications market, opening up new opportunities, he says.
"There's also a big market for protocol monitoring. A big problem people have is dropped calls, and when more 3G is deployed combining voice and data, it's another level of complexity," he said.
"On the data side, if you start dropping data then people are not very happy at all. All this is something we are strong in from the logic analyser side of the business, so we are either the stamp of approval that the system is working or we are finding the weak link."
"Eventually we will be building systems that can stress the system to test for voice and data. We are already getting requests for products that blast the hardware and overload the network both in a simulation environment and in the field in amulti-vendor environment."

The next challenge is the '4G' technologies, where Internet Protocol (IP) technology is integrated into today's networks. "4G certainly takes us more down the internet approach - it takes the data side a level up, but the biggest challenge is that it's not really defined other than a concept," said Wills. "It means an all IP network including the radio part so it's a next generation access network but the protocols aren't really defined yet. You have release 6 and 7 of UMTS but it's hard to say what 4G will actually look like."
There will be increasing problems, particularly with security. "Network security is going to emerge as an important topic. Now the technology is very robust and the issues move from the transport layer to the applications layer, so you have to be able to look at the data inside the packets. The network will get much simpler because an all IP network is simpler to manage and operate like an enterprise network but that will be a very, very big issue because IP is not designed as a secure technology and operators have a completely different view of security than the enterprise."

Fundamental limits?

Are there any fundamental limits in sight? "I think we are quite a way from fundamental limits," he said. "The only thing that holds us back in this space is what the consumer will demand. Will it be picture phones or more data and how will that put pressure on the operators and the network? It does mean that we have to build flexible platforms that we can take in a number of different directions and the difference with that is we have to understand all these generations and that's one of the most difficult issues. We have a lot of discussions about that."
That changes the way the equipment is designed. "It has to be modular in hardware and software because we don't know how they are going to be used and we can't create unique products for each area.
"So we are taking more of a modular system view of how we define test."