Vendors extend communications test offerings
Rohde & Schwarz, National Instruments, and Agilent Technologies have been busy over the past week with a variety of product and services introductions. Agilent kicked off the month by announcing that all new Agilent electronic test instruments sold after March 1 will be covered by a “bumper-to-bumper” 3-year repair warranty. Ken Woonton, Americas services marketing manager for Agilent's Electronic Measurement Group, said the increase from one year to three years is the result of ongoing quality initiatives that, from 2002 to 2012, yielded unprecedented improvements in product reliability. Click here for more.
In addition, Agilent introduced compliance testing support for MOST (Media-Oriented Systems Transport) and BroadR-Reach standards used in emerging automotive applications. Agilent’s solution covers all equipment needed for physical-layer testing, including oscilloscopes, spectrum analyzers, and pulse/function generators. Click here for more. This initiative comes a week after Agilent teamed up with The University of New Hampshire Interoperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL) to demonstrate MIPI testing capabilities at Mobile World Congress 2013 in Barcelona. Click here for more.
National Instruments announced its second vector signal transceiver, the NI PXIe-5645R, which is built on a software-designed architecture that engineers can modify with NI LabVIEW to meet their specific needs. The new vector signal transceiver adds a high-performance, differential or single-ended I/Q interface to test both the RF and baseband signals of a device with a single instrument for faster test times using the latest PC and FPGA technologies. Click here for more.
For its part, Rohde & Schwarz announced it has added the rugged, passive R&S RT ZZ80 broadband probe to its portfolio. This probe, recommended for the R&S RTO oscilloscope, offers a bandwidth of 8 GHz. The passive broadband probes such as the R&S RT-ZZ80 are a cost-efficient, rugged alternative to active, high bandwidth probes and are suited for testing transmission lines with low impedance (20 Ω to 100 Ω). Click here for more.
In addition, the company said it has extended the frequency range of its portable R&S FSH spectrum analyzers with two new models offering users frequency ranges up to 13.6 GHz and 20 GHz. The new models complement the 3.6-GHz and 8-GHz ranges respectively covered by the R&S FSH4 and the R&S FSH8. And finally, the company said the R&S CMW500 wideband radio communication tester, when equipped with the R&S CMW-KS750 option, supports TD-SCDMA signaling functionality to help chipset and mobile phone makers address the Chinese market. Click here and here for more.
In other recent news, AEMC introduced 8-channel dataloggers; Melexis chose Multitest's MT9510 test handler for gesture recognition IC; GOEPEL demonstrated its ESA technology with a Xilinx Zynq-7000 SoC at Embedded World, and the company also extended its VarioTAP emulation technology to Energy Micro's Giant Gecko microcontrollers; Linear Technology Corp. announced the LTC3300-1, a high-efficiency bidirectional multicell battery balancer for equalizing cell state of charge (SoC) in a series-connected battery stack; and Elsys debuted a portable data-acquisition system.