NI extends PXI RF capabilities Washington DC

National Instruments chose its NIWeek event in August to announce that it has extended the measurement range of its PXI RF instrument line-up beyond 6 GHz. The company debuted two instruments, the NI PXIe-5663 6.6-GHz RF vector signal analyzer and the NI PXIe-5673 6.6-GHz RF vector signal generator, as well as the NI PXIe-1075 18-slot high-bandwidth chassis.

Both PXI cards include 16-bit data converters, support OFDM and MIMO modulation schemes, and can test multiprotocol cellphones with radios meeting WiMAX, GPS, WCDMA, GSM, EDGE, broadcast video, 802.11 WiFi, and Bluetooth standards. Because the cards are based on software-defined architectures, engineers can develop and test wireless protocols by simply reconfiguring the software by using LabView toolkits or writing their own modulation algorithms.

The NI PXIe-5663 RF vector signal analyzer handles signals from 10 MHz to 6.6 GHz with up to 50 MHz of instantaneous bandwidth. It also offers pass-band flatness and low phase noise for accurately measuring modulated signals

The NI PXIe-5673 vector signal generator delivers signal generation from 85 MHz to 6.6 GHz and uses direct RF upconversion to provide up to 100 MHz of RF bandwidth. An impairment mode enables engineers to use an onboard FPGA to manually adjust gain imbalance, I/Q offsets, and quadrature skew. With the card's baseband impairments optimized for a particular frequency, engineers can achieve better than -85 dBc of carrier and image suppression.

The NI PXIe-1075 chassis provides PCI Express lanes routed to every slot, providing up to 1 Gbyte/s per-slot bandwidth and up to 4 Gbyte/s total system bandwidth. It provides eight hybrid slots that can hold either PXI Express or PXI hybrid-slot-compatible modules. The chassis offers an operating temperature range of 0 to 50°C.

Base prices: PXIe-5663 vector signal analyzer-$22,999; PXIe-5673 vector signal generator-$23,999; PXIe-1075 chassis-$5999. National Instruments, www.ni.com.