Wednesday, March 14, 2018

Keysight builds mmWave testbed with Ball Aerospace and Anokiwave

Keysight Technologies is working with Ball Aerospace and Anokiwave to validate the first commercial 5G NR active array antenna product designs in the 26 GHz band.

The Keysight 5G NR-ready measurement testbed offers the precision that base station and component designers require to extensively explore the performance edges of a new class of active antenna systems in the “European Pioneer Band.”


“As our network equipment manufacturing customers are racing to be first to market, they expect to acquire velocity through their development cycle by leveraging their test solutions at each stage, from R&D to design verification to manufacturing,” said Giampaolo Tardioli, vice president of the Network Infrastructure Unit, Keysight Technologies. “Keysight modular hardware and software solutions seamlessly combine metrology-grade mmWave hardware and format-specific software measurements. These customers can now scale from today’s 4G evolved designs (under 6 GHz) into the new mmWave bands, and accelerate a faster transition into production, with minimum cost.”

The Ball Aerospace-built 256-element array uses Anokiwave integrated circuits, and was designed to deliver 5G modulation in GHz-wide bandwidths in either a single-beam mode or in MIMO applications for up to 4 concurrent beams with up to +60 dBm EIRP.