Anite has announced that it is the first to release a device testing solution for enhanced Inter-Cell Interference Coordination, or eICIC, an LTE-Advanced feature that deals with interference issues in heterogeneous networks that include both macro sites as well as small cells.
Anite said its testing system is based on its Developmental Toolset and was “verified through close collaboration with a leading Asian device manufacturer.”
HetNets with macro, pico and other small cells deployed for better coverage and capacity have interference issues with hand-offs between small cells and the macro network; eICIC is designed to address this.
“Interference at cell edge boundaries is intensified when low power small cells are added to macro cells in the same channel,” Anite noted. “As a key feature of LTE-A, eICIC enables mobile operators to control this interference, ensuring that devices work optimally on the cell edge boundaries.”
“Working in close collaboration with leading chipset and device manufacturers has allowed us to achieve significant advances within LTE-Advanced and develop support for key features such as eICIC and carrier aggregation”, said Paul Beaver, products director at Anite.
— National Instruments has made several additions to its Labview reconfigurable I/O (RIO) architecture, to increase its flexibility and power.
“As devices under test increase in complexity, engineers need new strategies to remain competitive and meet time to market deadlines while reducing cost,” said Charles Schroeder, NI director of test systems.
The company said that the most significant of the upgrades were new instrument driver FPGA extensions, a feature of its NI RF signal analyzer and RF signal generator instrument drivers, so that those with little or no FPGA programming experience can use it.
“The user-programmable FPGA on the NI vector signal transceiver is absolutely essential for addressing the challenges associated with testing the latest highly-integrated RF components.” said Gorkem Guven, vice president at Hittite Microwave Corporation. “With instrument driver FPGA extensions and the LabVIEW programming experience, we can easily take advantage of the FPGA to dramatically decrease our test times while preserving all of the hardware and software functionality we expect from our RF test equipment.”
Another addition, the NI PXIe-7975R NI FlexRIO FPGA module, offers Xilinx 7 series FPGA technology for automated test and high-performance embedded applications.
