National Instruments wireless local area network (WLan) test system can generate and analyse RF signal measurements four times faster than other modular instrumentation systems and up to 10 times faster than traditional box instruments.

The test system combines 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 system 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 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 fast measurement times with software-defined PXI instrumentation such as the PXI Express RF 6.6 GHz instruments.

The WLan test system consists of the NI PXIe-5663 6.6 GHz RF vector signal analyser, 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 1Gbytes/s per-slot bandwidth and up to 4Gbytes/s total system bandwidth. This 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.

More information: www.ni.com/automatedtest/wlan