The big news of the week, of course, was Keysight Technologies’ announcement that it will purchase Anite for $606 million. Read more on that transaction, expected to close this fall, here. In other news across the testing industry this week:
• Cobham Wireless, formerly Aeroflex, added support for small cell testing to its radio frequency automated test equipment system that relies on PXI modular equipment and Cobham’s PCI Maestro software.
The ATE now supports fast RF alignment for multiple devices under test and RF performance verification measurements for small cells, Cobham Wireless said, as well as integrated device control software specific to Qualcomm’s FSM99xx enterprise, residential and metro small cells.
Tim Carey, senior product manager for modular instruments at Cobham Wireless, said in a statement that the company’s femtocell customers “are looking for solutions that can accelerate their development on the bench while providing scalability in volume manufacturing” and added that extending support for Qualcomm’s solutions “helps to secure the investment of existing customers in the evolving Cobham Wireless PXI platform.”
• Anritsu and reverberation chamber over-the-air testing company Bluetest continue their collaboration on OTA with the news this week that support for Bluetest’s fifth generation test system is integrated into Anritsu’s new MT8821C Radio Communication Analyzer for LTE-Advanced.
The two companies collaborated on OTA measurements for three-component-carrier carrier aggregation late last year. Bluetest launched a new reverberation test system and software in April that includes an integrated measurement computer; the Anritsu equipment supports Bluetest’s newest generation as well as its previous reverb test system and measurement suite.
Francois Ortolan, wireless specialist with Anritsu, said that it is “obvious that we needed to provide Bluetest with access to the MT8821C to facilitate a smooth migration to the latest technology for OTA testing and that Bluetest also took the opportunity to include support for our 2CC UL CA functionality at the same time.”
Anritsu said this week that it has signed an agreement with Electro Rent for sales and service support as a preferred reseller in the U.S. and Canada.
• Also in OTA testing news, Spirent Communications said that it was chosen as the exclusive vendor for MIMO and A-GNSS OTA testing for Electro Magnetic Test Labs, as part of CTIA OTA testing. EMT Labs has an anechoic chamber for OTA testing.
• Texas Instruments launched an RF synthesizer this week that it says is the industry’s lowest power wideband RF synthesizer. The LMW2571 covers up to 1.34 GHz and can be used for applications including low-power wireless technologies, handheld oscilloscopes and signal analyzers.
• JDSU has appointed boards for Viavi and Lumentum, the two companies into which it is splitting. Viavi’s board includes members from Facebook and Plantronics, while Lumentum has members from Equinix and FirstRain. Complete board membership lists are available here. The process is expected to be completed in the third quarter.
• Keysight Technologies announced that its EEs of EDA simulation tools were used by signal design and verification company Asygn and semiconductor company Kalray to validate PCI Express Gen 3 high-speed serial links on Kalray’s low-power PCIe acceleration board.
• In case you missed it, P3 Communications released its initial benchmarking for voice over LTE in the Washington, D.C., area – full story on that here. P3 put out its data on call set-up times (much faster than circuit-switched voice) and voice quality (also significantly improved) in what is the first broad, public look at the performance of VoLTE in live networks.
I spoke with CEO Dirk Bernhardt on the testing and the results, and one particular point of interest was how infrequently calls dropped back to legacy voice – one of the major technical challenges of VoLTE implementation. Granted, this is in an urban area with good LTE coverage, but out of about 7,000 calls, Bernhardt said, there were only a handful that switched from VoLTE to 3G on AT&T Mobility’s network, and one call on T-Mobile US’ network that jumped from VoLTE to 2G. All of the calls maintained their connection, although the voice quality dropped back to 2G/3G levels.
