LAN test suite

National Instruments has announced a wireless local area network test solution that is claimed to generate and analyse RF signal measurements four times faster than other modular instrumentation and up to 10 times faster than traditional box instruments.

The test combines WLAN Measurement Suite software for 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 can easily configure their same measurement hardware to set more than six other RF communications standards including GPS, WiMAX, Bluetooth and RFID.

The suite consists of modular hardware and user-defined software allowing engineers to take advantage of the latest CPU advances such as multicore processing and parallel programming to achieve the fast software-defined PCI instrumentation such as the PXI Express RF 6.6 GHz instruments.

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

Because the instrumentation is defined in software, engineers can customise RF measurements for multi-standard devices such as systems on a chip, mobile phones and radios using the same instrumentation.

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

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

The PXIe-1075 chassis provides up to 1 GBps per-slot bandwidth and up to 4 GBps total system bandwidth.