Keysight announces PXI multivendor calibration services

July 20, 2016

Santa Rosa, CA. Keysight Technologies today announced that it has extended its One-Stop Calibration Services to include non-Keysight equipment, reinforcing the company’s commitment to support complete test systems.

Keysight’s One-Stop Calibration Services ensure ongoing accuracy and availability of test assets, as well as electrical, physical, dimensional, and optical equipment from virtually any manufacturer. This helps engineers develop, deploy, and maintain test systems at a lower cost.

Today’s test systems often integrate instruments of different form factors from multiple vendors. This includes an increasing number of PXI and AXIe instruments being used with traditional benchtop instruments. These instruments are frequently deployed in complex solutions that require onsite setup, maintenance, and repair. Keysight’s One-Stop Calibration Services address the growing need for better multivendor system support and is now covering more than 100,000 products, including non-Keysight benchtop, PXI, and AXIe instruments.

“We recognize that test systems are a key resource for a business and a growing percentage of test systems incorporate PXI and AXIe instruments,” said John Page, president, Services Solution Group, Keysight. “Our worldwide network of experts can assist customers with uptime support, calibration, and maintenance of these systems, as well as system architecture.”

Keysight today also announced it has expanded its offering of high-performance PXI and AXIe instruments and reference solutions. The instruments and solutions are used in a wide range of applications, including 5G, PA/FEM, and digital interconnect test, to increase test speed, improve accuracy, and reduce the overall footprint. The new products are part of Keysight’s on-going commitment to deliver RF, microwave and digital measurement expertise in the PXI and AXIe instrument form factors. Using the best available instruments—benchtop, modular, or a combination—the reference solutions deliver hardware and software test configurations for critical applications, including 5G, EW threat simulations, and digital interconnect test.

The M9019A PXIe 18-slot Gen 3 chassis, controller, I/O components, and external PC option offer at least two times more system bandwidth than a typical Gen 2 chassis, and the external PC option removes the limitations on PC selection imposed by closed PXIe systems.

With Keysight’s open Gen 3 platform, customers can select an external PC or controller that best meets their need—for example, a 5G or electronic warfare application requiring a PC optimized for the capture and playback of large data streams or a MIMO application requiring a large, multichannel and multi-chassis PXIe test systems.

The 4-slot M9421A PXIe vector transceiver (VXT) and the M9111A PXIe high-speed source/measure unit (SMU) improve test throughput, reduce the overall footprint, and are built for production test and design validation of next-generation PA/FEMs. The new PXIe VXT and SMU will be the part of Keysight’s RF PA/FEM characterization and test reference solution.

Covering frequencies from 60 MHz to 6 GHz, with modulation and analysis bandwidth up to 160 MHz, the VXT supports FPGA-accelerated measurements and includes software that supports analog demodulation, noise figure and a broad range of cellular and wireless connectivity formats. The SMU changes voltage, stabilizes and accurately measures microamps, all in less than 1 ms. This is a 20 times speed improvement over previous-generation, stand-alone Keysight SMUs, and is a fraction of the size.

The new Digital Interconnect Test reference solution is a fast cable tester and features the PXI VNA with full cross-bar S-parameter calibration of 32-ports up to 26.5 GHz. The PLTS software offers complete domain analysis with a convenient production test interface.

Here are descriptions of other recently introduced products:

  • The M9195B PXIe digital stimulus/response (DSR) module, an improved version of the M9195A model, delivers multiple module synchronization and pattern editing software.
  • The M9203A PXIe 12-bit high-speed digitizer/wideband digital receiver is designed for testing the latest wireless communication, radar and satellite devices.
  • The M8030A multichannel BERT, used with the M9514A 14-slot AXIe chassis for multi-lane testing and the M8070A system software, provides simultaneous characterization of up to 10 BERT channels and minimizes crosstalk in high-channel, high-data-rate applications.
  • The M8040A highly integrated BERT for physical layer characterization and compliance testing, with data rates up to 64 GBaud, covers all types of 400 GbE standards and simplifies characterization of PAM-4 and NRZ receivers.
  • The second-generation M9537A AXIe embedded controller provides high-speed computing power for data intensive analysis and multiple module support and displays multiple waveforms and analysis tools simultaneously for enhanced troubleshooting.
  • The M9703B AXIe 12-bit high-speed digitizer/wideband digital receiver, an improved version of the M9703A model, is suitable for multichannel applications requiring phase coherency, wideband frequency analysis, high dynamic range, and streaming and recording capability.

Keysight’s rapid repair turnaround, with calibration, core exchange strategy, and standard three-year warranty maximizes system uptime to reduce the total cost of ownership.

www.keysight.com/find/modularJuly2016

About the Author

Rick Nelson | Contributing Editor

Rick is currently Contributing Technical Editor. He was Executive Editor for EE in 2011-2018. Previously he served on several publications, including EDN and Vision Systems Design, and has received awards for signed editorials from the American Society of Business Publication Editors. He began as a design engineer at General Electric and Litton Industries and earned a BSEE degree from Penn State.

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