Glenn Farris, Vice President, Marketing. Universal Instruments

Building on the back of over 30 years of board test innovations, first as HP, then Agilent and now Keysight Technologies, we will continue to work very closely with leaders in the electronics manufacturing test industry in 2015. We are strengthening the synergy with our customers and enabling more applications with our core boundary scan, in-circuit and functional test technologies.

For instance, based on our successes with early adopters for deploying embedded test and low-access testing into the manufacturing environment, we believe our new applications built upon our x1149 boundary scan analyzer will become mainstream and play an important role to help customers build better quality boards.

This is true for boards which are proving to be very tough to test with in-circuit test and imaging inspection due to the numerous ball grid arrays, 3D integrated circuits, and package-on-package on these boards. Next-generation note books, mobiles, tablets and smart phones use these core technologies. In addition, with product demand driven by the Internet of Things, future PCBAs will just get more complex. Keysight has the technology and capabilities to help our customers move forward in these areas.

In the areas of automotive electronics and industrial electronics, Keysight's in-circuit test technology offers a very high value proposition with very accurate & stable tests with extensive tool box our i1000D and i3070 in-circuit test platforms. Our extensive customer implementation experience with the new inline ICT systems have created new technologies which can enable customers to successfully execute automation with ease.

Together with our functional test platforms, these solutions complement one another to offer customers a total test solution on the production line where customers can have confidence in very high quality tests. Our test applications in this area cover emerging areas like adaptive safety, NAND flash programming, electronic parking brakes, as well as new levels of infotainment modules and extensive ECU applications.

Keysight is investing in and improving its 3070 platform with a fairly large and important launch of software release 9.0 capabilities. We are not only improving the throughput by having concurrent test technology, we are also introducing Phase 1 of our modern user interface which will help test engineers speed up their test development faster than ever before. Keysight is also improving the test development software for the new i1000 SFP and inline solution which was recently introduced, and these will help enable faster test development.

The 2nd area which we are investing energy in is effort in improving our boundary scan platform with multiple releases over the year to help customers have an even more complete suite of solutions. We already have solutions for SSDs, notebooks and tablets, with the x1149 platform as the centerpiece.

In the area of functional testing, we have new introductions like the M9188A, a PXI-based, 1-slot unipolar dynamic D/A converter which has 16 channels. In the mechatronic high voltage test market, due to the lack of options, customers often have had to adopt low voltage DAC solutions by adding custom signal conditioning, slowing down development time and increasing cost. We believe the M9188A Dynamic DAC perfectly fits the need to simulate signals such as wheel speed sensors for automotive applications and other high voltage applications, including aerospace and defense.

Are we expanding? Yes, in tandem with demand, we have added field resources in China, US and Europe to help us fuel our growth and help boost the level of intimacy for our customer support.

At Keysight Technologies, we participate in a number of key electronics manufacturing opportunities -- some of these are technology oriented trends which have become heightened, while some are market-driven trends. We see manufacturing maintaining its momentum and we think 2015 will be a positive year for the industry as a whole.