EB (Elektrobit) has announced what is claimed to be the industry's first commercially available Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output (MIMO) Over-the-Air (OTA) emulator to increase the performance and data rate of MIMO mobile terminals. Previously, the company delivered a custom solution for LG Electronics and now is making it commercially available for other mobile terminal vendors as well as to wireless operators. With the new MIMO OTA emulator customers can benchmark the performance of mobile devices for Quality of Service, data throughput, latency and spectrum availability to select the best devices needed to address the growing adoption of higher data rate applications.

Traditionally, OTA testing focused on Single-Input-Single-Output (SISO) devices by only measuring power and antenna efficiency. With MIMO OTA testing, the true performance of the terminal can be assessed as a whole. It allows users to evaluate different designs in a fully repeatable and realistic wireless network environment so they can test all critical parts of the mobile terminal design at once, including antennas, RF front end and baseband processing. This eliminates the need for cables and test connectors leaving the mobile device intact, which provides more accurate results of how the device will perform in a real-world environment.

The EB Propsim F8 MIMO OTA emulator is designed to meet the conformance and beyond-conformance testing requirements of WCDMA, HSPA, 3GPP LT, WiMAX and WLAN.

"As consumers continue to demand higher data rate applications for e-mail, video and social networking, we see an increased need for new mobile devices to utilize MIMO technology to improve wireless capacity," said Antti Sivula, Senior Vice President of EB's Wireless Communications Tools Business. "The more complex these terminals become, the greater the need for an easy-to-use and repeatable MIMO OTA testing method. Our EB Propsim F8 MIMO OTA emulator provides a reliable testing solution to produce accurate results to evaluate the real-world performance of mobile devices for mobile terminal vendors, wireless operators, certified test houses and antenna manufacturers."