News Briefs

Aeroflex has added the ability to undertake live receiver and transmitter testing, including HSDPA testing, to its 6413A UMTS base-station test system. The capability will enable providers to perform ongoing maintenance of UMTS base stations without taking the systems out of service, meaning there will be no disruption to live traffic.

A single-box solution, the 6413A can take complete control of a base station via the Iub interface and perform transmitter, receiver, and functional tests without external control equipment or the need for detailed knowledge of the base station's operation and control. The addition of live receiver and transmitter testing capabilities to the tester complements its existing test mode, which facilitates repeatable test scenarios in controlled environments based on the methods defined in the ETSI standard 3GPP TS25.141.

With the instrument’s touch-screen controls, users can initiate all functions from the front panel. Measurement results can be viewed while tests are running or stored for later analysis. Tests can be run manually or automatically using preprogrammed test sequences. www.aeroflex.com

Azimuth Systems, a provider of WiFi engineering test equipment, has announced that it has received $7.5 million in new venture capital funding from its current investors and that Jim Iuliano will join the company as CEO. The company said the new funding and management change will prepare it for expansion into the WiMax and cellular markets.

Founding CEO Ray Cronin commented, “Jim Iuliano’s successful experience scaling systems businesses will enable Azimuth to accelerate its growth. We worked hard to find the right person to take us to the next level, and I look forward to working closely with Jim over the coming months to transition leadership of Azimuth during our significant growth phase.”

Iuliano has been CEO for both public and private technology companies for more than a decade. Previously, he was CEO of E Ink, where he took the company from start-up into commercialization, built a global presence, and secured strategic alliances with Sony, Philips Electronics, and Lucent, among others.

Prior to E Ink, Iuliano was president and CEO of Molecular Devices, and he led the company through 20 consecutive quarters of record revenues and profitability and was instrumental in orchestrating the measurement system company’s IPO. Most recently, Iuliano was an entrepreneur in residence at North Bridge Venture Partners.

“Azimuth is extremely well positioned in the WiFi industry and for expansion into the WiMax and cellular markets,” said Iuliano. “Ray has done a great job leading the company from concept to market leader, and I’m excited to build upon the many successes the team has achieved.” www.azimuthsystems.com.

LogicVision has announced that Rapport, which specializes in low-cost, dynamically configurable, massively parallel chips for compute-intensive applications at low power, has adopted LogicVision’s memory BIST for next-generation Kilocore Architecture-based products.

The Rapport Kilocore devices combine hundreds or thousands of parallel processing elements in small, low-power chips that can be dynamically reconfigured in real time for consumer-electronics, mobile-gaming, homeland-security, server, image-processing, and suitcase-supercomputing applications. LogicVision’s Embedded Memory Test provides built-in memory test for this type of device.

“LogicVision’s Memory BIST solution gives us the flexibility we need to effectively and efficiently test the different embedded memories in next-generation Rapport Kilocore Architecture devices,” said Dr. Benjamin Levine, director of chip development at Rapport. “LogicVision offers a solution that allows us to hierarchically group and test different types and sizes of memories and allows us to select the best options for testing each one. Logic-Vision also provides us with the tools to easily integrate their BIST solutions into our design flow with a minimum of effort.” www.logicvision.com.

The NI PCIe-6536 25-MHz and NI PCIe-6537 50-MHz digital I/O boards build on the throughput of the PCI Express interface to acquire and generate large digital patterns to meet applications including interfacing to memory devices, emulating communications protocols, and testing image sensors and display panels. The digital boards feature maximum clock rates of 25 MHz and 50 MHz across 32 channels for a maximum sustainable throughput of 100 Mbyte/s and 200 Mbyte/s, respectively.

Engineers can set the direction of each channel for acquisition or generation and can choose from 2.5-, 3.3-, or 5.0-V TTL-compliant logic levels per direction. The boards are capable of both synchronous and asynchronous timing modes. Engineers also can synchronize the new PCI Express digital boards with other PCI Express data-acquisition boards to create mixed-signal test systems. Customers can reuse existing digital applications written with the NI-DAQmx API for the NI 6533 and NI 6534 digital devices with the new PCI Express instruments.

Base price: $1799. National Instruments, www.ni.com.

Engineers looking to debug digital systems need to isolate the causes of problems. The more samples of digital signals and bus transactions you can see, the more likely you are to find the source of the problem. To aid you in this task, Agilent Technologies has released the 16900 two-slot modular logic analyzer mainframe and two analyzer modules. The 16901A mainframe features a 15-in. color touch-screen display so you can get a clear view of bus signals. And it measures just 14.2-in. deep, which saves bench space.

Both of the logic analyzer modules provide 68 channels at a 1066-Mbps data rate, 4-GHz high-speed timing, and 1200-MHz conventional timing. The difference between them resides in their amount of memory. The 16950B has memory options of 1 Msample, 4 Msamples, 16 Msamples, 32 Msamples, and 64 Msamples. The 16951B provides 256 Msamples of memory. Applications include defense, wireless communications, wireline communications, and consumer electronics. Designers of PCI Express systems can use the FSI-60112 probe, which lets the instrument capture serial data on X1, X2, and X4 lane widths.

Prices: 16900 mainframe—$14,000; 16950A logic analyzer—$23,500; 16951B logic analyzer—$65,000; FSI-60112 probe—$19,500; B4645A—$3,000. Agilent Technologies, www.agilent.com.

Measurement Science Conference, January 22–26, Long Beach, CA. Sponsored by The Measurement Science Conference. www.msc-conf.com.

APEX/IPC Printed Circuits Expo, February 20–27, Los Angeles, CA. Sponsored by IPC. www.goapex.org.

OFC/NFOEC, March 25–29, Los Angeles, CA. Sponsored by Optical Society of America, IEEE, and Telcordia. www.ofcnfoec.org.

To learn about other conferences, courses, and calls for papers, visit www.tmworld.com/events.