Keysight Technologies – Enhancing the OpenTAP platform through a web- and server-based application
The Corporate Sponsored Senior Projects Program (CSSPP) provides engineering students the opportunity to gain industry-level skills while also delivering effective solutions for corporate sponsor products. Keysight Technologies, a test and measurement company founded in 2014 as a spin-out from Agilent Technologies, which was originally founded in 1939 as HP’s electronic measurement business, has partnered with the Baskin Engineering CSSPP for two consecutive academic years, leading to full-time employment for two CSSPP students.
“This program is a mutually beneficial engagement where we help students out by giving them interesting projects to work on, which can be applied to industry and potentially a role with us, and they help us by working on projects that will be deployed as real products for Keysight,” said Brennen Direnzo, Keysight automation product manager and CSSPP industry project lead.
Both Direnzo and Ivan Diep (B.S. ‘21 computer science), last year’s CSSPP student who was hired full-time with Keysight, led the 2021–22 team. The project addressed an issue within OpenTAP, an open source test automation project Keysight launched in 2019. The OpenTAP team, which both Direnzo and Diep are a part of, handles test equipment integration with a wide range of companies that manufacture electronic components and devices.
At the start of the two-quarter project, one of OpenTAP’s tools at the time, known as the Timing Analyzer, was limited in what it could do and how many files it could support for its clients. Keysight’s sponsors tasked the five-student engineering team to develop an application that can support large files within the OpenTAP platform and enhance its overall functionality.
The students were able to meet the goals of the project by creating a web- and server-based application capable of supporting large files and providing additional functions for clients to easily parse out and visualize their data.
“It was a wonderful experience working with my peers and the Keysight team. We achieved quite a lot during the two quarters,” said Sidhant Bahl, one of the five students on the Keysight CSSPP team.
The other four students on the team were Artyom Martirosyan, Mason Rylander, Ryan Lee, and Sriram Ramesh. Rylander joined Keysight full-time after graduation, marking the second student hire in two years.
“I am really looking forward to meeting smart people in the industry and creating useful connections,” Rylander said.
After the students finished documenting the work and training OpenTAP engineers at Keysight on the new application, it was added into Keysight's automation program.
“The CSSPP sponsorship has been great for us,” said Jeff Dralla, Keysight director of software business development, who sponsored the project after hearing about it through interactions with UCSC’s Center for Research in Open Source Software (CROSS) and its director Professor Carlos Maltzahn. “So great that we have signed up for a third consecutive year with CSSPP. Seeing engineering students work together in real-world scenarios on real-world projects relevant to our business objectives has proven to be valuable, educational, efficient, and most of all, fun.”
