OTA emulator makes wireless test truly wireless

Wireless test is going truly wireless with EB Elektrobit’s new EB Propsim F8 MIMO OTA emulator, which the company says is the industry’s first commercially available MIMO OTA (over-the-air) emulator that supports the increased the performance and data rates of MIMO mobile terminals. Janne Kolu, director of product management for wireless communications tools, said the company has delivered a custom implementation for LG Electronics and is now making a commercial version available for other mobile terminal vendors as well as to wireless operators.The new system is tailored for testing relatively small devices such as terminals, antennas, smart phones, and laptops. A complete test system consists of transmitters, a radio channel emulator, and an anechoic chamber that includes multiple antennas reasonably spaced from the DUT. Consequently, the system tests a DUT without requiring cable connections to the DUT, and it performs end-to-end test of the DUT’s antennas, RF front end, and baseband processor in a single operation.

With the MIMO OTA emulator, EB’s customers can benchmark the performance of mobile devices for quality of service, data throughput, latency, and spectrum availability to select the best devices needed to address the growing adoption of higher data-rate applications such as downloading graphics, playing games, and watching video.

The EB Propsim F8 MIMO OTA emulator is designed to meet the conformance-testing requirements of WCDMA, HSPA, 3GPP LTE, WiMAX, and WLAN.