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Today's Automation News Headlines from Automation.com
| National Instruments introduces Wireless LAN Test Suite | ||
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.jpg) March 25, 2009 – National Instruments announced a new wireless local area network (WLAN) test solution that can generate and analyze RF signal measurements four times faster than other modular instrumentation solutions and up to 10 times faster than traditional box instruments. The test solution combines new NI WLAN Measurement Suite software for the National Instruments LabVIEW and LabWindows/CVI development environments with NI 6.6 GHz PXI Express RF hardware to deliver increased speed and flexibility for testing IEEE 802.11 a/b/g standards. Because the solution is software-defined, engineers easily 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 the industry’s best 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 technological advances such as multicore processing and parallel programming techniques to achieve the fastest measurement times in the industry with software-defined PXI instrumentation such as the PXI Express RF 6.6 GHz instruments. Also, with the parallel programming capabilities of LabVIEW, the PXI-based RF measurement times will continue to decrease with each evolution of multicore CPUs, thus maximizing measurement performance, increasing system longevity and decreasing capital investment. Because the instrumentation is defined in software, engineers can easily customize RF measurements for multi-standard devices such as systems on a chip (SOC), mobile phones and radios using the same instrumentation. The new WLAN test solution consists of the NI PXIe-5663 6.6 GHz RF vector signal analyzer, NI PXIe-5673 6.6 GHz 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 6.6 GHz with up to 50 MHz of instantaneous bandwidth while the NI PXIe-5673 delivers signal generation from 85 MHz to 6.6 GHz with up to 100 MHz of instantaneous bandwidth. The NI PXIe-1075 chassis provides up to 1 GB/s per-slot bandwidth and up to 4 GB/s total system bandwidth. This world-class measurement system produces residual error vector magnitude (EVM) measurements as low as -44 dB. 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 quickly get started with automated test applications. Engineers can generate 802.11 a/b/g signals with data rates ranging from 1 Mb/s to 54 Mb/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. About National Instruments National Instruments is transforming the way engineers and scientists design, prototype and deploy systems for measurement, automation and embedded applications. NI empowers customers with off-the-shelf software such as NI LabVIEW and modular cost-effective hardware, and sells to a broad base of more than 25,000 different companies worldwide, with no one customer representing more than 3 percent of revenue and no one industry representing more than 10 percent of revenue. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, NI has more than 5,000 employees and direct operations in more than 40 countries. For the past 10 years, FORTUNE magazine has named NI one of the 100 best companies to work for in America. |
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