NI introduces fast wireless LAN test suite

National Instruments (NI) has announced a wireless local area network (WLAN) test solution that can quickly generate and analyse RF signal measurements.

The test solution combines NI WLAN Measurement Suite software for the NI Labview and Labwindows/CVI development environments with NI 6.6GHz PXI Express RF hardware to deliver increased speed and flexibility for testing IEEE 802.11 a/b/g standards.

Engineers can configure their same measurement hardware to test more than six other RF communications standards including GPS, Wimax, Bluetooth and RFID.

The WLAN Measurement Suite offers measurement throughput and flexibility through a software-defined architecture.

With software-defined instrumentation, which consists of modular hardware and user-defined software, engineers can take advantage of the latest CPU technologies to achieve fast measurement times with PXI instrumentation such as the PXI Express RF 6.6GHz instruments.

With the parallel programming capabilities of Labview, the PXI-based RF measurement times will continue to decrease with each evolution of multi-core CPUs.

Engineers can customise RF measurements for multi-standard devices, such as systems on a chip (SOC), mobile phones and radios, using the same instrumentation.

The WLAN test solution consists of the NI PXIe-5663 6.6GHz RF vector signal analyser, NI PXIe-5673 6.6GHz vector signal generator, NI PXIe-1075 18-slot high-bandwidth chassis and NI PXIe-8106 dual-core controller.

The NI PXIe-5663 can perform signal analysis from 10MHz to 6.6GHz with up to 50MHz of instantaneous bandwidth, while the NI PXIe-5673 delivers signal generation from 85MHz to 6.6GHz with up to 100MHz of instantaneous bandwidth.

The NI PXIe-1075 chassis provides up to 1GB/s per-slot bandwidth and up to 4GB/s total system bandwidth.

This measurement system produces residual error vector magnitude (EVM) measurements as low as -44dB.

As a result, engineers can use the same measurement system from research and design, where measurement accuracy is critical, to production test, where measurement speed is critical.

WLAN Measurement Suite software consists of the NI WLAN Generation Toolkit and the NI WLAN Analysis Toolkit for Labview and Labwindows/CVI.

Both toolkits come with several example programs, helping engineers to get started with automated test applications.

Engineers can generate 802.11 a/b/g signals with data rates ranging from 1Mb/s to 54Mb/s with the WLAN Generation Toolkit.

Using the WLAN Analysis Toolkit, engineers can perform physical (PHY) layer measurements, such as power, error vector magnitude (EVM) and spectrum mask margin.

In addition to these benefits, PXI RF test systems perform each of these measurements up to 10-times faster than alternative RF measurement platforms.

Using the NI PXIe-8106 controller, EVM measurements are performed as fast as 8ms and 66MHz spectrum mask measurements as fast as 18ms.

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