Multi-Radio

Wireless applications are revolutionizing consumer electronics spawning an explosion in number and variety of multi-radio devices. As usual, chipset companies are spearheading development of such devices by making increasingly integrated solutions. Ultimately, though, each radio’s physical characteristics (PHY) must be fine-tuned and tested against the various industry standards that underpin each technology – WiFi, WiMAX, Bluetooth, GPS, FM and so on. This poses an increasing challenge for manufacturing quality testing. Though new features and additional radios are added to each new device, prices remain the same or lower due to extreme competitive pressure. That, in turn, puts pressure on production costs which include test costs.

To some extent the standards, themselves, establish the lower time limits for testing. But handling, test methods, and tester architectures can add significant time and cost to the mix. Multi-radio test innovations must address all of these factors and strive to limit time and cost without compromising test integrity.

LitePoint already had a history of multi-radio innovation soon after introducing its first product. That test system’s architecture allowed users to test devices having both WiFi and Bluetooth radios. Later, LitePoint revolutionized multi-radio test with the world’s first test system designed to test any four of six radios and their standards (chosen by software licensing), and the ability to test several radios and standards in parallel. Applied to the same device, the IQ2010 Multicom Tester was able to cut overall test time by three-fourths (e.g. from about 60 seconds to just 15 seconds).

The winner of EDN China’s Innovation 2009 Award, LitePoint’s IQ2010 is a huge leap forward in tackling the quality-testing challenges posed by today’s cost-constrained, high-volume, multi-radio devices. In February 2010, LitePoint introduced the IQxstream, a multi-radio tester of another dimension. Here, again, we offer a single-box system, but it’s one that covers a host of 3G and 4G radios and standards. Test time has been successfully reduced by using multi-core processing to do parallel analysis. In addition, IQxstream is designed to test up to four devices in near-parallel fashion. Finally, with a 100 MHz capture bandwidth, the new system can capture several channels’ worth of signal in parallel. We call this architecture “parallelism cubed™” or “P³.”

Like the IQ2010 before it, the IQxstream can be used for both development and manfacturing test.