Chinese over-the-air measurement company General Test Systems and Japanese test and measurement company Toyo plan to form a new U.S.-based company called AeroGT Labs. The board of both companies have approved the plans, and the new company will combine products, market knowledge and sales experience from both of its parent companies. GTS and Toyo expect the new company to become a leading global OTA testing player with a focus on connected vehicles, consumer electronics and “satellite and terrestrial instruments segments and verticals,” according to a release.
Toyo’s U.S. subsidiary is called ToyoTech. The new AeroGT Labs will be based in Fremont, California and will initially share ToyoTech’s offices, although it will have its own management team and strategies. Bo Han, ToyoTech’s current CEO, has been named CEO and president of AeroGT.
In forming the new company, the partners cited numbers from market research firm Allied, predicting that the global OTA measurement market is expected to grow by 12% annually and reach $3.1 billion by 2025. The segment of the OTA market for vehicles, particularly autonomous vehicles, “is expected to exhibit even higher growth rates,” the two companies noted.
The transaction is expected to close during this quarter. GTS shareholders (the company is privately held) will own 51% of AeroGT, and ToyoTech shareholders will own 49%.
“Over the past decade, we have designed and manufactured preeminent OTA measurement solutions for a wide variety of vertical and industry segments,” said Fred Yu, CEO of GTS, in a statement. “While we have found immense success in our home country of the [People’s Republic of China], we continuously look to increase our business footprint elsewhere around the world. AeroGT unlocks the value of our solutions to global markets while strengthening the competitive positioning of our technologies.”
“This is a transformative time for manufacturers that incorporate wireless technologies into their products, particularly for developers and producers of autonomous and intelligent connected vehicles,” said Toshiya Kohno, CEO and president of Toyo. “We are particularly excited that large markets in the United States and the European Union will be able to benefit from the solution offerings of AeroGT.”
In other test news:
–Rohde & Schwarz has unveiled a new one-box tester for 5G, its R&S CMX500. Promising the ability to support even complex test setups for all 5G NR deployments, Rohde says that the tester supports “a large variety of the present and future 3GPP band combinations” for 5G. The tester supports LTE and 5G New Radio deployments in Frequency Ranges 1 and 2 (sub-6 GHz and millimeter wave), for both FDD and TDD spectrum in Non-Standalone and Standalone modes. Rohde & Schwarz said that to achieve a single-box tester, it integrated new sub-8 GHz radio frequency units and new remote radio heads that cover mmWave frequencies up to 50 GHz. The test company said that the new instrument can support carrier aggregation with up to eight component carriers and combinations of FR1 and FR2 in the downlink.
-Teledyne LeCroy has launched a USB4 compliance test option for its Voyager M4x analyzer and exerciser system. The software can be used with additional software from the USB Implementers Forum in order to generate traffic and verify responses for official test specifications for USB4 logical, protocol and tunnel layer compliance, the company added.
–Anritsu says that the PCI Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG) has adopted Anritsu’s Signal Quality Analyzer-R MP1900A BERT for compliance testing at PCI-SIG workshops, which are held quarterly to certify PCIe devices.
–Spirent Communications has put out a new report on 5G trends and insights, based on its observations from customer engagements. Read more here.
-Network testing company EXFO has announced a new collaboration with Red Hat, focused on adaptive service assurance for a software-centric 5G world. Full story is here.
-ICYMI: Signals Research Group has tested Verizon’s 5G “Ultra Wideband” network, which now encompasses both the carrier’s C-Band and millimeter-wave spectrum. That network is markedly different — and much higher performing — compared to the incarnation of the carrier’s 5G network that relies on Dynamic Spectrum Sharing between LTE and 5G, the testing and analysis firm says. Read the details here.
