With a readily available labor force and low labor costs, it’s easy to see why “Made in China” or “Made in Taiwan” has become so ubiquitous. But lowering manufacturing costs is just one of the areas that has motivated companies to move their production facilities to Asia. The Asian manufacturers have also made fast-time-to-market (FTTM) a key feature, especially in the technology space where product life cycles are short and hitting market windows critical to success or failure.

For the technology companies, the first step was to reduce their costs by tapping the vast pool of readily-available, and adaptable operators to man the production line. This, coupled with the relatively short product lifecycles of technology products, made expensive, automated factories with robotic equipment less attractive and quite frankly, unnecessary. It was faster and more cost effective to retrain their staff and deploy them on new products and a factory could be brought online much faster to address FTTM requirements.

Their next challenge was to increase test coverage. They need to produce complex products of high quality with reduced manufacturing costs and test time …essentially doing more in less time. This requirement fueled the demand for production test solutions that were low-cost, easy to use, and designed to test more in less time. LitePoint has been the first to step up to this challenge by providing complete turnkey, out-of-the-box manufacturing solutions for WLAN.

Today, the Asian manufacturers continue to push the envelope and generate continued demand for test solutions of complex products designed to address the customized needs of high-volume manufacturers and the test industry is responding. LitePoint, specifically, is responding to this urgent need by providing solutions such as concurrent testing of multiple technologies, multi-DUT testing and parallel and non-signaling test methodologies that enable device manufacturers to continually increase product complexity, while still cutting the test time. It is often said that “necessity is the mother of invention” and in the wireless test market this continues to be the case.