Jul 8 2014
Teradyne, Inc., the market leader in wireless device test, introduced its latest wireless test solution for the UltraFLEX test platform.
This release expands on Teradyne’s market-leading position by introducing a new RF instrument, the UltraWave24, a new DSP Processor, the UltraDSP1, and the latest version of the Enhanced Signal Analyzer (ESA) Toolkit. These products continue to enhance the UltraFLEX’s industry-leading performance while reducing program development time, shortening time-to-market and driving down the cost-of-test. Teradyne has received orders from multiple customers for this next generation wireless test solution and it is currently in production at multiple manufacturing sites.
The UltraWave24 is Teradyne's sixth generation RF instrument. Each new generation has expanded performance capability while continuing to drive down the cost-of-test. The resource density of the UltraWave24 was increased to enable higher parallelism for next-generation devices. Parallelism was also increased by a factor of two for most critical functions including RF receivers, modulated sources and multi-tone sources. In addition, the modulation bandwidth of the UltraWave24 was expanded to enable full specification testing of emerging wireless standards, including 802.11ac and LTE-A. The UltraWave24 is fully self-contained when sourcing and capturing modulated waveforms since no other tester resources are used. The phase noise and amplitude accuracy performance of the instrument is uniquely capable of achieving the test quality requirements for future LTE-A devices.
The UltraDSP1 expands the native background DSP processing capability of the UltraFLEX by providing up to 32 dedicated processing cores. LTE-A and testing of Error Vector magnitude, combined with the increase in available frequency bands and higher test parallelism, is increasing the volume of test by a factor of 10 or more per generation. UltraDSP1 provides the computational horsepower to handle this rapid growth without increasing test times. The UltraFLEX offers a dedicated, scalable processing solution for background data analysis of RF tests while moving data automatically, with no user intervention, resulting in less test code, faster test times and shorter time-to-market.
The ESA Toolkit leverages Agilent’s 89600VSA Version 17.22 software to get the latest support for the most challenging communications standards. It integrates Agilent’s industry-standard algorithms and debug tools with Teradyne’s Signal Definition Editor into the IG-XL test environment to make test development and debug simple and fast. The ESA Toolkit allows users to program complicated modulation and demodulation tests with fewer lines of code, making the ESA Toolkit the premier modulation test environment. Whether it is the most complicated 802.11ac MU-MIMO modulation scheme, multi-channel intra-band Carrier Aggregation testing for LTE-Advanced or any other Agilent VSA standard, the ESA Toolkit is equipped to give customers an easy way to implement, debug and correlate the most difficult tests.
“The combination of the UltraWave24 instrument, UltraDSP1 computer, and ESA Toolkit builds on the strong position that the UltraFLEX has achieved in the test of leading edge LTE Advanced transceivers and 802.11ac radios,” said Stephen Pruitt, RF Segment Manager at Teradyne. “The continued expansion of the LTE-A and 802.11ac standards require production test equipment with bench level measurement performance and the infrastructure to handle the enormous amounts of measurement data. The UltraFLEX Wireless Test Solution provides the solution to that challenge.”
Source: http://www.teradyne.com/