EDA and test companies team up on LTE

Rohde & Schwarz and Synopsys will collaborate to accelerate the design and verification of LTE and LTE-Advanced systems.

Rick Nelson, Editorial Direcor -- Test & Measurement World, 7/1/2011 12:00:00 AM

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LTE is gaining considerable attention from design and test firms, with the most recent news coming from Rohde & Schwarz and Synopsys, which have announced a collaborative effort to accelerate the design and verification of LTE and LTE-Advanced wireless systems. That news complements recent LTE-related announcements from companies including Aeroflex, Agilent Technologies, Anritsu, and ETS Lindgren, as I reported on this page in May.

In the latest news, Synopsys is contributing its algorithm design and verification tools, including standards-compliant reference libraries. Rohde & Schwarz is contributing its signal generators, against which the Synopsys’ LTE and LTE-Advanced libraries have been verified to increase designer confidence in achieving standards compliance when evaluating prototypes and samples.

Rohde & Schwarz signal generators can be cross verified against the Synopsys LTE library, which in turn will support automatic configuration of the signal generators.

Through the collaboration, the companies will verify Synopsys’ LTE library for its System Studio and SPW tools, including upcoming LTE-Advanced enhancements, against the Rohde & Schwarz SMU200A and SMBV100A signal generators, which in turn will be able to automatically derive their configuration from the Synopsys simulation setup. Since typical configurations consist of more than 100 parameters, this integration reduces the time it takes to achieve a correct setup. The integration also reduces the risk of configuration inconsistencies that can result in losing days of system-integration time in the lab.

According to Markus Willems, senior product marketing manager for system-level solutions at Synopsys, and Simon Ache, product manager for signal generators and power meters at Rohde & Schwarz, Rohde & Schwarz and Synopsys found they were talking to many of the same companies but to different teams within those companies when marketing LTE-related offerings. While Synopsys was addressing concept engineers and algorithm designers, Rohde & Schwarz was addressing manufacturing engineers and chipset developers working with real silicon. The two companies realized they could collaborate on assisting both the algorithm designers and the chipset developers.

By making it possible for an LTE library to be validated against a signal generator, they said, the two companies are enabling I/Q signal equivalence for both algorithm designers and chipset developers. The use of a bit-equivalent I/Q signal throughout all phases of the design process from concept to final hardware test facilitates comparison and cross analysis throughout the process and increases confidence in standards compliance. In addition, the use of bit-equivalent signals simplifies debug should an inconsistency occur between simulation and hardware test.

From an instrument perspective, the SPW/System Studio automatic configuration capability reduces test-equipment setup time while avoiding wasted system-integration time because of configuration errors. It also ensures consistency of signal generation for both simulation and test, and it supports the reuse of regression scripts from simulation setup during the integration testing phase. T&MW

Goepel and SPEA team up on boundary scan Goepel Electronic and SPEA have developed a boundary-scan option for the SPEA 4060 flying-prober test system. Within the integration, an automatic test-program-generation process combines in-circuit and boundary-scan test. Goepel provides integration packages that contain a controller for USB, LAN, and cabled PCI Express; a TAP transceiver with differential signal transmission; and TIC02/SR TAP interface card modules to be installed on the flying-probe shuttle. www.goepel.com; www.spea.com. Boosting flying-prober throughput Digitaltest reports it was able to augment a Condor flying-probe system that its customer EKM Elektronik had bought in 2003. A Digitaltest engineer designed a 90-pin vacuum fixture for EKM’s Condor, enabling EKM to increase its board-test throughput from 30 boards to 70 boards in 8 hr. Digitaltest says the Condor permits functional tests using up to 1012 fixed probes through bottom-side access of a board. www.digitaltest.net; www.ekm-elektronik.de. Test house chooses InCarrier Multitest has received an order for InCarrier test equipment from a test house in Asia. The customer chose the InCarrier loader/unloader, an InStrip handler, and an InMEMS module for accelerometer MEMS test. InCarrier offers an alternative to standard singulated package test. www.multitest.com.