Antenna company Airgain has unveiled a new testing laboratory focused on 5G millimeter wave. The company said that the bands being used for 5G mmWave networks “create a new set of challenges for development and testing, with much higher levels of atmospheric loss, very short channel coherence times and propagation of signals that is primarily line-of-sight. Overcoming these not only requires new design approaches, but also significant investments in new testing systems to help quickly identify issues and enable swift design revisions.”
“5G mmWave will enable a dramatic shift in the capabilities of wireless connectivity. However, nothing comes without a cost, and development and testing of antennas to support the higher frequencies involved presents a unique set of challenges – from beamforming capabilities required in antennas to propagation characteristics of mmWave bands,” said Ricky Chair, senior director of engineering for 5G research and development at Airgain.
Airgain said that the new lab supports radio performance testing and validation from 24 GHz to 65 GHz, with the capability to test systems including small cells, fixed wireless access infrastructure and customer premise equipment as well as enterprise access points. The company’s antenna test chamber will provide S-parameter, gain, polarization and other radiation pattern information for both free-space and embedded antenna, according to Airgain.
In other test news:
–Viavi Solutions and Teledyne LeCroy battled it out this week over firsts in the PCI Express 5.0 space. Viavi said that it was part of the first PCIe demo of protocol analysis at the PCI-SIG Developers Conference in California this week, leveraging the Xgig platform.
PCIe 5.0 doubles the capacity of a PCIe link to 32 Gbps per unidirectional channel, or greater than one terabit per second across the common 16-lane bidirectional slot interface, in order to support high-bandwidth applications such as 400GbE, artificial intelligence and large-scale IoT.
“The ability to test computing and storage network equipment and identify how and when a system fails is key to developing the most robust, high-performance solutions possible for data-heavy applications,” said Tom Fawcett, VP and GM for Viavi’s lab and production business unit. “What really puts Viavi at the forefront of the industry is our willingness to be both market-focused and standards-focused – while the industry is still preparing for PCIe 5.0, we are involved with the key enablers of that ecosystem, participating in standardization efforts but also working with our customers to validate early prototypes.”
Teledyne LeCroy, meanwhile, was also on-hand at PCI-SIG DevCon and said that it is first to market with protocol analyzers for PCIe 5.0. Its Summit line of protocol analyzers supports either PCI3 4.0 or 5.0 specs, the company said.
“Teledyne LeCroy protocol analyzers have been at the forefront of PCIe development since its inception, and our tools played an important role in the validation of the new PCIe 5.0 specification,” said Joe Mendolia, VP of marketing for Teledyne LeCroy’s protocol solutions group. “As a result, we are first to market with test equipment enabling companies to develop products using the new high-speed specification.”
–GL Communications said that it has boosted the capabilities of its tProbe Datacom Analyzer/Emulator, which is designed to test serial data communication circuits and equipment. The analyzer/emulator now support Windows Client/Server (WCS) scripting software for remote operation, automated testing and multi-site connectivity, according to GL.
-What does low-latency mean for cable capabilities? Steve Glennon, distinguished technologist for CableLabs’ Advanced Technology Group, laid out the use cases and work behind the industry group’s low-latency standards for DOCSIS in a blog entry this week. CableLabs considered this question, he wrote: What applications will drive a need for 60Mbps+ of sustained Internet bandwidth? (Short answer: immersive, 360-degree virtual reality, including holographic telepresence.) Read more here.
-Polish internet of things company AVSystem said this week that it has a new interoperability program with AT&T for lightweight M2M communications. AVSystem said that the automatic interoperability testing of LwM2M and the collaboration with AT&T “promotes LwM2M as the primary protocol for IoT device management to help reduce the fragmentation of technologies in IoT and bring the flexibility required in cross-vertical deployments.”
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