Anritsu Co. announces that its ME7873L RF/RRM Conformance Test System has achieved the world’s first Test Platform Approval Criteria (TPAC) for LTE-Advanced Carrier Aggregation (CA). This industry-leading achievement in the Global Certification Forum (GCF) enables wireless device manufacturers to implement certification of devices employing this new technology. 

Anritsu started validations for LTE-Advanced CA (WI-162) in October 2013, and achieved TPAC for two band combinations (1-5 and 3-8) in January 2014. Concurrently, Anritsu achieved the 80% validation level for five additional inter-band combinations for PTCRB (RFT-103). In addition to being the only company in the industry to have achieved TPAC for LTE-Advanced CA, Anritsu leads the industry for the number of validated test cases and number of validated bands.

Global network operators are now deploying LTE-Advanced CA, creating a need for conformance testing and test systems to bring new wireless devices to market. Anritsu will continue to focus its efforts on expanding test case coverage to new band combinations and additional LTE-Advanced technologies to enable certification of future wireless devices.

The ME7873L is a scalable GCF and PTCRB-validated test system that enables certification of LTE devices to industry and carrier standards. Test coverage is available for 3GPP 36.521-1 (TX, RX, and Performance), 36.521-3 (Radio Resource Management – RRM) and operator/carrier-specific Supplementary RF test requirement packages. Additionally, the ME7873L provides FDD CA test case coverage for both inter-band and intra-band CA with MIMO, using two Component Carriers (CC) in the downlink and either one or two CC (contiguous) in the uplink.