Speed, flexibility key for RF PXI instruments
Rick Nelson, Editor-in-Chief -- Test & Measurement World, 8/7/2008 2:14:00 PM
AUSTIN, TX. National Instruments chose its NIWeek event held here this week to announce that it is extending the measurement range of its PXI RF instrument lineup beyond 6 GHz. The company debuted two instruments, the NI PXIe-5663 6.6-GHz RF vector signal analyzer and the NI PXIe-5673 6.6-GHz RF vector signal generator, as well as the NI PXIe-1075 18-slot high-bandwidth chassis.
Richard McDonell, product marketing senior group manager, said during an interview at NIWeek that the new products will strengthen NI’s ability to provide instrumentation that can participate in the test of the 1 billion handsets expected to be produced over the next year. In developing the products, McDonell said, NI engineers focused on accuracy (which he called “a given” in the RF test space) as well as flexibility and measurement speed.
To address accuracy, he said, the instruments include 16-bit data converters. In addition, the NI PXIe-5663 RF vector signal analyzer offers pass-band flatness and low phase noise so it can accurately measure modulated signals. For example, the company reports, typical EVM performance for W-CDMA is 0.8% at 2 GHz for more than 2600 symbols, while typical EVM performance for WiMAX is -52 dB at 3.8 GHz.
To provide flexibility, McDonell said, the instruments can support OFDM and MIMO modulation schemes and can test multi-protocol cell-phone UUTs that include radios meeting WiMAX, GPS, W-CDMA, GSM, EDGE, broadcast video, 802.11 Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth standards. He added that tight integration with NI’s LabView toolkits contributes to the instruments’ flexibility. He said that the software-defined architecture of an NI RF PXI system enables engineers to develop and test wireless protocols by simply reconfiguring the software using standard-specific LabView toolkits from NI or its alliance partners or by writing their own custom modulation algorithms. The software-defined architecture, he said, contrasts with competing approaches based on a closed-software paradigm.
As for measurement speed, McDonell said NI’s PXI implementation can offer from four-fold to a 30-fold reduction in test time, and he presented data showing a 14-fold improvement in measurement speed, vs. a rack-and-stack approach, for W-CDMA ACLR (adjacent channel leakage ratio) measurements. An ACLR measurement, he said, can require as little as 8 ms. Measurement and analysis speed is enhanced, McDonell added, by the instruments’ ability, when running under NI’s new LabView 8.6 release, to take advantage of multicore processors. He noted that as new multicore processors become available, PXI-based RF measurement times will continue to decrease without requiring changes to the RF instrumentation or to the test programs.
The NI PXIe-5663 can perform signal analysis from 10 MHz to 6.6 GHz with up to 50-MHz of instantaneous bandwidth. The NI PXIe-5673 delivers signal generation from 85 MHz to 6.6 GHz and up to 100-MHz of instantaneous bandwidth. The NI PXIe-1075 chassis provides PCI Express lanes routed to every slot, providing up to 1 Gbyte/s per-slot bandwidth and up to 4 Gbyte/s total system bandwidth.
In addition to quickly performing cell-phone test, engineers also can use the new instruments to speed up general-purpose measurements. For example, the company reports that a typical 50-MHz spectrum sweep with a 30-kHz resolution bandwidth takes just under 4 ms with an NI PXIe-8106 controller, while traditional instruments can take 100 ms or more for the same measurement.
The NI PXIe-5673 RF vector signal generator uses direct RF upconversion to provide up to 100 MHz of RF bandwidth. An impairment mode enables engineers to make use of an onboard FPGA to manually adjust gain imbalance, IQ offsets, and quadrature skew. With base-band impairments optimized for a particular frequency, engineers can achieve better than -85 dBc of carrier and image suppression.
The NI PXIe-1075 18-slot chassis provides eight hybrid slots that engineers can use for either PXI Express or PXI hybrid-slot-compatible modules. The chassis offers an operating temperature range of 0 to 50 degrees Celsius and provides integrated capabilities to provide power management and to monitor temperature and fan health for the entire chassis.
Base prices: PXIe-5663 vector signal analyzer, $22,999; PXIe-5673 vector signal generator, from $23,999; and PXIe-1075 chassis, $5999.
National Instruments, www.ni.com/rf/platform.
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