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Test and Measurement: Rohde & Schwarz breaks ground on €60m facility expansion

Munich-based test company expands facility in Germany

Rohde & Schwarz broke ground this week on an expanded, 60-million-euro facility to be constructed in Memmingen, which is about 115 kilometers from Munich.

Munich-based R&S already has about 1,800 employees working at its Memmingen location and the expansion is expected to drive additional recruiting. The new technology and production center will have about 18,000 square meters of floor space, and Rohde says that it “demonstrates the clear commitment Rohde & Schwarz has made to Germany as a business location.”

“The construction of the new building in Memmingen underscores our strategy of in-house development and production in Germany,” said Christian Leicher, president and CEO of Rohde & Schwarz. “Our high degree of vertical integration and close proximity of development to production have always proven to be factors in our success. This approach allows us to offer our customers not only cutting-edge technology, but also a high level of security and reliability.”

Currently, the company said, its employees working in Memmingen and Teisnach (another Bavarian city on the other side of Munich, near the Czech border) manufacture most of the Rohde & Schwarz product range in-house. Michael Dill, plant manager in Memmingen, said, “The investment by Rohde & Schwarz will strengthen the Memmingen location over the long term, which is something we are obviously delighted about. … Our very strong growth is driving demand for dozens of new employees, especially in development and production.”

The groundbreaking ceremony was held on Monday of this week, and completion of the “Neubau-Süd” (New Building South) project is expected in mid-2024, according to the company.

In other test news:

-ICYMI: With the Super Bowl coming up this weekend, don’t miss Signals Research Group’s look at how the national carriers have put together the capacity they’ll need for one of the most usage-intensive environments that there is. Some tidbits: T-Mo has mmWave in play, a software update has made some AT&T devices able to access new 3.45-3.55 midband spectrum and more in this piece.

Anritsu has launched a new, general purpose handheld spectrum analyzer meant to be a value instrument, the Field Master MS2070A. The test company said that the new Field Master covers a range up to 3 GHz and the features and performance for “reliable and accurate RF measurements in a variety of general-purpose field, lab, and manufacturing environments” at an economical price.

Keysight Technologies touted its participation in research and development around future 6G systems in Europe, through four projects that are part of the European-Union-funded 6G Smart Networks and Services Joint Undertaking (SNS-JU) focused on innovation to support as-yet-unstandardized 6G systems and a European supply chain for them. Keysight said it is participating in four 6G SNS projects that have begun and will run for two to three years: 6G-SANDBOX, focused on the combination of digital and physical nodes and controllable end-to-end networks for validation of 6G tech; CENTRIC, for air interfaces that use artificial intelligence; Imagine-B5G, for the implementation of a programmable, cloud-native, best-of-breed “beyond 5G” network platform; and 6G SHINE, for developing components for “short range extreme communications” to replace wired connections.

Keysight also said this week that MISIC Microelectronics is using Keysight’s S930705B Modulation Distortion solution for characterization of the company’s microwave devices and components.

T-Mobile US garnered the overall best 5G experience in the second half of 2022, per Rootmetrics, but AT&T also had a strong performance at the state level and Verizon did particularly well at the metro level. Read more details in the full story here.

Teledyne LeCroy said that it is supporting compliance testing support for hyperscale, enterprise-level storage devices using the second generation of the OCP Datacenter NVMe SSD specification v2.0 from Austin Labs testing services, within the OakGate DDS test platform.

ABOUT AUTHOR

Kelly Hill
Kelly Hill
Kelly reports on network test and measurement, as well as the use of big data and analytics. She first covered the wireless industry for RCR Wireless News in 2005, focusing on carriers and mobile virtual network operators, then took a few years’ hiatus and returned to RCR Wireless News to write about heterogeneous networks and network infrastructure. Kelly is an Ohio native with a masters degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley, where she focused on science writing and multimedia. She has written for the San Francisco Chronicle, The Oregonian and The Canton Repository. Follow her on Twitter: @khillrcr