National Instruments (NI) and a software provider have collaborated to deliver complete RF/communications test and analysis solutions based on modular hardware and software. Hence, to test compliance of IEEE 802.15.4 WPAN (ZigBee) and IEEE 802.11 (WiFi) applications, engineers now can use SeaSolve Software Inc. tools that integrate with NI PXI-based RF hardware and the LabVIEW graphical development environment for a flexible and cost-effective solution.

“NI’s RF technology includes hardware and software for accelerating the development and testing of emerging wireless standards while increasing ease of use and flexibility for the engineer,” said Joseph E. Kovacs, NI RF product marketing manager. “With the addition of SeaSolve’s software solutions based on NI LabVIEW, engineers can perform RF physical layer compliance tests while taking advantage of the flexibility and speed that the NI PXI-based RF hardware offers.”

SeaSolve recently developed a compliance test software solution for the ZigBee and WiFi standards that integrates with the NI PXI-5660 vector signal analyzer, the NI PXI-5670 and PXI-5671 vector signal generators as well as the NI Modulation Toolkit for LabVIEW. With this software, engineers can perform the physical-layer RF tests specified by the standard on their devices with pass/fail results. These tests range from transmit center frequency tolerance and receiver sensitivity to symbol rate and maximum input power. Because this solution is based on modular hardware, engineers save significant time and costs developing their test systems and reusing the same instruments for testing various standards. In addition, SeaSolve engineers are currently exploring IEEE 802.16 WMAN (WiMAX) compliance testing solutions with LabVIEW and NI RF hardware and software.

“SeaSolve chose to develop this solution on the proven National Instruments LabVIEW and PXI-based RF platform because of the PXI platform’s inherent speed advantage as well as the short time to market that the solution offers as a whole,” said Nadeem Sayed, SeaSolve business development manager. “As new standards are continually introduced to wireless communications, engineers can take advantage of the PXI platform’s flexibility to scale these new standards. With this modular hardware approach, engineers can easily modify their test systems with minimal cost and effort.”

RSS    Save to Del.icio.us  Digg This