Aeroflex adds WiMAX, 1xEvDO and HSUPA measurement suites to PXI 3000 plaform

With the addition of these new measurement suites, the Aeroflex modular RF test systems now allow testing of cellular, WLAN and WiMAX in one product, whereas competitive test systems must be configured from numerous instruments making them more costly, bulky, slower and harder to integrate.

“Manufacturers are continuously demanding increased test coverage as they strive to keep their test systems up-to-date with the latest wireless standards. Aeroflex is unique because our modular platform is hardware re-configurable to support different frequency ranges and analysis bandwidths. Our PXI 3000 Series now supports any combination of GSM/EDGE, W-CDMA, cdma2000, 1xEVDO, WLAN 802.11a,b,g and WiMAX 802.16e standards within the same platform. No other single product can offer such flexibility,” said Tim Carey, product manager, PXI Systems, Aeroflex Stevenage.

Aeroflex provides signal generation and analysis in a single, configurable platform for testing RF components and wireless devices. With Aeroflex’s modular PXI-based manufacturing test systems, customers can protect their investment by rapidly upgrading their test systems via software updates or plug-and-play hardware. Customers can easily add test capability with minimal effort and investment in new equipment and software.

The WiMAX measurement suite expands upon the capability of the Aeroflex 3030 Series PXI RF digitizer family to perform WiMAX PHY (physical layer) OFDMA (orthogonal frequency domain multiple access) device testing of power, spectrum and modulation measurements in accordance with IEEE 802.16e. Designed for PXI-based RF test systems used in development and manufacturing of PC plug-in cards, handheld terminal devices and modules for integration in other equipment, the WIMAX software library provides analysis of OFDMA RF transmit signal characteristics for both uplink and downlink. For complete RF characterisation, the WiMAX measurement library, combined with Aeroflex’s IQCreatorTM waveform creation software provides a high-performance, high-speed stimulus and response capability for WiMAX OFDMA.

The CDMA2000 measurement suite has been upgraded to include support for 1xEvDO reverse link measurements. Together with an Aeroflex 3030 Series PXI RF digitizer, they enable the precision characterisation of both CDMA2000 rev C and 1xEvDO rev 0 reverse link transmissions. The CDMA2000 and 1xEVDO measurement suite provides analysis of all major signal characteristics in accordance with the requirements of 3GPP2 C.S0011-A rel C and C.S0024 ver 4 for CDMA2000 and 1xEvDO rev 0 reverse link transmissions. The measurement suite is designed for PXI-based RF test systems used in the development and manufacturing of mobile radio transmitters, sub-modules and RFICs.

UMTS Uplink Measurement Suite - The UMTS UL (Uplink) measurement suite adds the capability to perform analysis of power, spectrum and modulation for 3GPP rel 6 HS-DPCCH and enhanced physical channels. This further enhances the capabilities of the Aeroflex 3030 Series RF digitizers. The measurement suite is designed for PXI-based RF test systems used in the development and manufacturing of consumer mobile device radio transmitters and sub-modules. The UMTS UL measurement library provides analysis of all major 3G W-CDMA signal characteristics.

All three new PXI measurement suites are libraries of special functions with both .dll and Visual Basic APIs (application programming interfaces) for use in a broad range of ADEs (application development environments) such as LabVIEW, LabWindows/CVI, Visual Basic and Visual C/C++. Each measurement suite is supplied with Help, including source code examples to aid the user in the development of measurement applications. Examples are provided for a variety of ADEs including Visual Basic 6, LabWindows CVI and Visual Basic C/C++.