At the 22nd GTI Workshop that just came to a close, test and measurement industry leader NI (National Instruments, National Instruments, NI) teamed up with well-known Skyworks Solutions to showcase Skyworks' 5G new air interface equipment and 5G RF chip test. The solution, and using the NI software-defined PXI platform, tested the products developed by Sky5TM (a unified platform developed by Skyworks) to realize revolutionary 5G applications.
Covering NSA and SA double standards, NI helps Skyworks 5G new air platform landing
'NI is very early in the 5G field and has invested heavily. Starting in 2015, NI is launching the 'RF Leading User Program' to team up with industry-leading companies to explore 5G-related prototyping and research. 'National Vice President, Automated Test Marketing Luke Schreier told the media that 'NI has collided with partners to create a lot of new ideas and ideas. When it comes to the 3GPP standard protocol, it can use the flexibility of the NI platform to truly reach the industrial application. For example, this GTI Workshop teamed up to showcase the Sky5TM platform, and NI's leading test technology is helping Skyworks accelerate time-to-market for its 5G applications.
According to reports, the NI test solution for Sky5TM fully supports the NSA and SA standards. The NI software-defined PXI platform can quickly verify the RF and DC performance of integrated products, and combines NI RF vector signal transceivers (VST) on hardware. Technology, providing instantaneous bandwidth up to 1 GHz and excellent DC measurement performance. Therefore, NI can meet the wide range of 5G new air interface testing requirements of the Sky5TM platform, including test carrier aggregation and wideband digital predistortion (DPD).
Luke Schreier said: 'NI provides tests, measurement tools that meet the requirements of the 3GPP R15 standard, and help the entire industry quickly adapt to the current state of the market and development. 'The NSA architecture is upgraded based on the original 4G network, NI has achieved The way to change the software to adapt to different protocols under this architecture; and the benefits of the SA architecture is more significant, through the independent 5G core network, can better support 5G large bandwidth, low latency and large connections and other services, and Customized services can be provided according to the scenario to meet the business needs of various users.
'SA architecture enables more possibilities for 5G application scenarios, and it also poses certain challenges for testing and measurement.' He added, 'But NI's important advantage in overall product strategy is flexibility, regardless of Software or hardware. Therefore, NI can provide customers with a very open test architecture, giving different options to implement different test projects. This is why NI is popular with customers in the communications field, such as Skyworks!
In this regard, Kevin Walsh, senior director of mobile marketing at Skyworks, who was interviewed by the media, said: 'NI has strong testing capabilities, and Skyworks can use NI's RF VST to verify the performance of the Sky5TM solution developed for 5G new air interface applications. With the NI PXI platform, Skyworks successfully validated key performance benchmarks, which greatly accelerated the entire product, system test cycle.
Sub-6G first, millimeter wave Subsequently, NI product layout ecologically easy to deal with 5G spectrum challenges!
Many well-known, spectrum resources are very limited. The choice of spectrum is repeatedly discussed in the process of 5G definition, and ultimately attributed to unification. At the beginning of 5G research, many people are full of expectations for the possibility of 5G using millimeter waves, because the frequency resources of millimeter wave More abundant. However, the current consensus in the industry is that the 5G communication spectrum of mobile terminals will be concentrated in the sub-6GHz band in the early stage. In order to meet the early demand for sub-6 GHz 5G new air interface applications, semiconductor companies have launched corresponding solutions. Solutions such as Skyworks have developed a fully integrated solution with bandwidths up to 200 MHz designed to support the architecture of mobile terminals.
For the new air interface requirements of Sub-6G 5G, NI has officially launched a reference test solution. The key component is the flexible NI-RFmx new air interface measurement software, which can be matched with different high-performance RF measurement hardware according to customer requirements. Helping customers reuse the same instruments and measuring equipment at various stages of product development, greatly shortening the test and product launch cycle. 'Sub-6GHz spectrum application will be the first to be introduced in the market, while 5G new air interface puts forward to the RF front end. High RF specifications require more time-to-market for products. NI's excellent test solutions offer tremendous advantages from lab validation to production line testing, which is a point of confidence for NI! ' Luke Schreier said.