National Instruments (NI) announces its collaboration with WisyTech, a wireless systems specialty spin-off of Italy’s National Research Council and Politecnico di Milano and partnership with ATE integrator Alfautomazione, on a forthcoming WiMAX toolkit for the NI LabVIEW graphical system design platform. The plug-in toolkit extends the ease-of-use of LabVIEW graphical programming to engineers and scientists developing WiMAX RF compliant devices, semiconductors, base stations and customer premises equipment.
“WisyTech offers extensive knowledge and experience with WiMAX from both its affiliation with the Politecnico di Milano research lab and its work in industry,” said Joseph E. Kovacs, senior RF and communications manager for National Instruments. “National Instruments is pleased to collaborate with WisyTech on this new toolkit to give engineers and scientists a test solution that combines the WiMAX expertise of WisyTech with the power of LabVIEW and our new 6.6 GHz PXI-based RF vector signal generator and vector signal analyzer instruments.”
Used for fixed and mobile communications, WiMAX is a telecommunications technology based on the IEEE 802.16 standard that is growing in the communications industry and has been deployed in several countries, including South Korea, Taiwan and India. The new toolkit will deliver a precisely tuned, plug-and-play solution for testing mobile devices and base stations based on the WiMAX standard. With advanced signal generation capabilities, the toolkit makes it possible for engineers and scientists to generate, store and analyze WiMAX I/Q baseband signals to test and troubleshoot WiMAX devices.
“LabVIEW is the optimal platform for wireless communications testing,” said Mauro Arigossi, CEO for WisyTech. “By using a software-defined approach to RF test, engineers and scientists benefit from instrumentation that continues to get faster as technology evolves.”
The new toolkit will be compatible with the recently released NI PXIe-5663 6.6 GHz RF vector signal analyzer and the NI PXIe-5673 6.6 GHz RF vector signal generator to execute flexible RF measurements up to 10 times faster than traditional RF instrumentation. It also will support both the IEEE 802.16d-2004 (Fixed) and 802.16e-2005 (Mobile) wireless standards.