Austin, TX. NIWeek got underway this morning with the introduction of a series of 28-GHz radio heads for NI’s mmWave Transceiver System. Kicking off the keynote session, Alex Davern, president and CEO, welcomed attendees with a promise to help them shrink time to productivity and time to market. He also led a standing ovation for company cofounder Dr. James Truchard, who has retired as CEO and who remains chairman of the board.
Eric Starkloff, executive vice president for sales and marketing, then commented that technology is moving faster than our ability to keep up. Phones are no longer phones but connected supercomputers, and our cars are becoming supercomputers on wheels. Success in today’s fast-moving environment requires a platform approach, he said, echoing Davern’s earlier comment that engineers today need suppliers who think in terms of decades, not quarters.
He then addressed 5G, pointing out that standardization efforts are accelerating. He said NI’s new 28-GHz radio heads (the mmRH-3642, mmRH-3652 and mmRH-3602) will help further 5G development efforts—enabling the first commercially available full transceiver of its kind that can transmit and receive signals with up to 2-GHz bandwidth in real time, covering spectrum from 27.5 GHz to 29.5 GHz. The mmWave Transceiver System software defined radio (SDR) and application-specific software offer a comprehensive starting point for 5G measurement and research addressing both the 3GPP and Verizon 5G specifications.
The mmWave Transceiver System can operate as either an access point or user device in any over-the-air testing scenario. Users can also develop mmWave communication prototyping systems or perform channel measurements using the same system. The software works with the previously released radio heads for 71 to 76 GHz, so users can easily adapt their mmWave Transceiver System to 28 GHz by changing the RF radio heads.
Starkloff then welcomed to the stage Arun Ghosh, director of advanced wireless technology at AT&T, who demonstrated his work using NI products for 28-GHz channel sounding, measuring attenuation and distortion in various environments (including the NIWeek keynote stage). He said LabVIEW FPGA enables data processing in real time.
Not content with 5G progress, Starkloff went on to mention 6G, which might make use of spectral coexistence. He invited onto the stage Paul Tilghman, a program manager at DARPA, who traced coexistence back to Marconi’s famous 7777 wireless patent. Tilghman said current spectrum usage, with rigid, licensed bands, is inefficient. DARPA’s Spectrum Collaboration Challenge (SC2) is offering $3.5 million in prizes to drive research into more effective spectrum usage.
Tilghman then described the Colosseum—not the one in Rome but rather DARPA’s Colosseum, “a next-generation electronic emulator of the invisible electromagnetic world” that resides in a 30-foot by 20-foot server room on the campus of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, MD.
“The Colosseum is the wireless research environment that we hope will catalyze the advent of autonomous, intelligent, and—most importantly, collaborative—radio technology, which will be essential as the population of devices linking wirelessly to each other and to the Internet continues to grow exponentially,” he said.
