Aeroflex Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary of Aeroflex Holding Corp., announced that the company is adding 802.11ac support to its popular PXI 3000 Series test system to facilitate the worldwide growth of 802.11ac Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) mobile devices.

Wireless devices using the 802.11ac standard will boast a 6X increase in network speed over 802.11n. The 802.11ac devices are faster because they use a less congested portion of the radio frequency (RF) spectrum, have wider bandwidth and use more advanced digital modulation techniques.

“We continue to stay ahead of the market, offering measurement suites for the latest wireless devices,” said Tim Carey, Product Manager for PXI, Aeroflex. “Our ability to continue to evolve the PXI 3000 platform quickly through software modularity is the key to its longevity and popularity with customers around the world.”

Aeroflex offers both transmitter and receiver testing for 802.11ac

Aeroflex PXI 3000 Series supports transmitter and receiver testing within one compact PXI modular RF test system.

The system is designed for use by silicon vendors, WLAN board integrators, consumer electronics device manufacturers, and contract manufacturers who need to perform RF parametric tests on devices during manufacturing.

Aeroflex’s PXI 3000 Series RF modules support wideband signal analysis and generation for frequencies up to 6 GHz, easily covering the bandwidth and frequency requirements of 802.11ac. Modulation schemes for 802.11ac are supported, from BPSK to 256QAM. Testing 256QAM demands lower error vector magnitude (EVM) within the test equipment. Aeroflex provides excellent residual EVM to help customers pinpoint signal degradation and identify the source of their problem.

About Aeroflex’s PXI Studio and IQCreator® software

The Aeroflex PXI Studio application software provides a graphical user interface to generate and analyze 802.11a,b,g,n and ac signals. IQCreator application software provides a graphical user interface to create WLAN 802.11a,b,g,n,ac arbitrary waveforms for use in PXI 3000 modular instruments.

The same analysis and waveform generation application software can be expanded to support a range of other communication standards on the same PXI 3000 system hardware including WiMAX, Bluetooth® BR/EDR/LE, ZigBee®, FM as well as all 2G, 3G and 4G cellular standards.

Remote programming user interfaces are available to support integration into automated test systems.