Evaulation_Engineering_August_2020 - 16

COMMUNICATIONS TEST

Avnet RFSoC Explorer application for MATLAB
and Simulink.

SPECIAL REPORT

VENDORS ADDRESS 5G,
WI-FI, V2X TEST NEEDS
By Rick Nelson, Contributing Technical Editor
	 Test-equipment vendors are keeping
pace with rapidly evolving technologies, including 5G, Wi-Fi 6, and vehicle-toeverything (V2X). Measurement chores
extend from testing small devices to massive MIMO antenna arrays. Products available include dedicated communicationstest platforms as well as general-purpose
instruments that can be adapted for specific communications technologies.
Software also has a role to play in bringing
together effective communications test
solutions.

Challenges
According to Craig Hendricks, market
development manager at Anritsu, "Our
customers are designing products utilizing
new technologies with evolving standards,
so they need test solutions that can verify
performance efficiently." He added that
Anritsu is involved in the standard organizations to stay current with the necessary
tests. "We use that knowledge to develop
test modules and software that address
emerging technologies such as 5G NR and

16

EVALUATION ENGINEERING AUGUST 2020

Wi-Fi 6 for our flexible product platforms
to provide customers with the necessary
support," he said, explaining that Anritsu
solutions can conduct RF, functional, and
protocol tests.
Adam Smith, LitePoint's director of
product marketing, commented on the
proliferation over the last few years of new
global spectrum availability. "Of particular note are the licensed 5G FR2 mmWave
bands (today at 24 to 40 GHz, and continuing to expand) and the '6 GHz' unlicensed
band (5.925 to 7.125 GHz). These frequencies are outside of the under-6 GHz 'comfort zone' of the majority of consumer wireless technologies, and require the makers
of products using these bands to tool with
new equipment."
Smith continued, "This is particularly
true in the manufacturing space, as
the installed base of test and measurement equipment does not support these
higher frequency bands. Product companies are finding themselves in need
of bringing leading-edge technology to
market, while also needing to keep the

production economics in line with established price points for consumer products.
Additionally, companies need to quickly
adopt these technologies and be able to
produce devices with high quality and high
production yield."
Luc Langlois, director, products and
emerging technologies/DSP at Avnet,
cited two challenges facing customers-
the first being system modeling for wireless communication. "Modern wireless
communication systems are designed by
multidisciplinary engineering teams working collaboratively," he said. "In the initial
concept phase, the system architect will
work at a high level of abstraction to create
mathematical models of the system in a
simulation environment such as MATLAB
and Simulink. Typically, the goal of this
phase is to demonstrate proof-of-concept
in a reasonable amount of time using existing off-the-shelf hardware. One of the
main challenges at this point is to exercise
the model with realistic test vectors that
represent actual operating conditions once
the system is ultimately deployed."
The second challenge, Langlois said,
relates to characterizing RF hardware for
5G applications. "Concurrent to system
modeling, the RF engineer must characterize the RF performance of candidate
hardware platforms for a given application,
he said. "For new and evolving standards
like 5G, this characterization task is made
more complicated as system requirements
will likely evolve along with the standard.
This places additional burdens on the
characterization process, as it needs to
be flexible enough to deal with shifting
requirements."
Complicating the characterization
task even further, he said, is the advent
of silicon devices with high levels of system integration, such as the Xilinx Zynq
UltraScale+ RFSoC with integrated multigigasample-per-second RF data converters. "For these complex devices, access to
the data converters can only be achieved
through the processing subsystem, which
may put an RF engineer used to working
with discrete converters on a workbench
into unfamiliar territory, as accessing the
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