SANTA CLARA, Calif., Jan. 13, 2010 -- Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: A) today announced that Yamagata University in Japan, has selected Agilent's SystemVue software for use in its emerging communications, physical layer (PHY) research. The electronic system-level software will play a critical role in the university's ongoing investigations and reduce by up to 30 percent the time required for design and verification of the Yamagata team's communication PHY system.
The research at Yamagata University is led by Associate Professor Katsumi Takano and is supported by the Strategic Information and Communications R&D Promotion Program in Japan's Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications. Katsumi and his team are pursuing algorithmic advances to expand the PHY transmission capacity of orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) signals over optical fiber backhaul links. Working toward this goal, the Yamagata team is evaluating single-sideband modulation techniques to create and receive OFDM signals. A key point in this process is to examine a variety of OFDM signal processing algorithms to determine how they will affect transmission performance.
Agilent's SystemVue software is designed to reduce the design and verification time of communication PHY systems and will allow the Yamagata team to create and verify its algorithms more quickly. The software can be used for coding, as well as modulation and de-modulation analysis, and uniquely supports both baseband and RF blocks. Using SystemVue, engineers can quickly and easily evaluate the performance of a PHY system in combination with an RF block.
"Agilent's SystemVue allows us to easily set up OFDM modulation signals and evaluate transmission performance," said Takano. "It also lets us easily download the OFDM signal to Agilent's Arbitrary Waveform Generator. As a result, we now save about 30 percent of the design and verification effort."
A new feature in SystemVue is especially well suited to the needs of the Yamagata team. The feature -- an OFDM-reference blockset -- is included in the W1461 SystemVue Communications Architect environment at no extra charge. This new OFDM reference library provides the low-level, parameterized baseband signal-processing blocks necessary to create and receive fully coded OFDM signals that underlie today's emerging PHYs (e.g., WLAN, WiMAX(tm) and 3GPP LTE). The OFDM library is applicable to both commercial wireless and aerospace/defense applications, and will be available for download, at no charge to supported users of Agilent SystemVue, in January 2010.
