Antenna company Taoglas USA opened an expanded design and test center for machine-to-machine and “Internet of Things” modules in San Diego.
Taoglas, which is based in Ireland, quadrupled the size of it’s current San Diego facility to more than 16,000 square feet for the new IoTx Center, which includes two CTIA-calibrated anechoic testing chambers, an antenna and RF cable assembly facility for custom work, plus office and work space. The facility is designed for support of product development from concept and prototyping to certification readiness. Taoglas also plans to increase its staff in San Diego by 50% this year, and said it expects to double its expanded workforce over the next three years.
“We have expanded our engineering team, added more test equipment and now have two chambers here to increase design and test capacity,” said Dermot O’Shea, president of Taoglas USA, in a statement. “As well as being able to prototype antennas and PCB’s … we can test the antenna and devices in operation on site to ensure they work reliably in the real world. We have also now added an antenna and cable assembly operation so we can quickly produce antenna and custom RF cable orders here in San Diego. Quite often customers require products in a few days rather than weeks and we have now facilitated that demand with this new move.”
Taoglas designs antennas for a wide range of connected products, from the new DSRC antennas for vehicle-to-vehicle communications to smart trash cans.
– NetScout’s Fluke Networks expanded its TruView Live software-as-a-service monitoring solution to include voice over IP, with synthetic call generation to ensure availability. TruView Live leverages a test sensor called a “pulse,” which is available either as a hardware device about the size of a remote control, or a virtualized software version – either downloadable locally or able to be hosted globally – with multiple service levels and a subscription model.
Jason Chaffee, senior product manager with NetScout, said the new VoIP monitoring enables calls to be made within or from outside an organization’s network, scheduled at regular intervals to ensure calls are going through, and supports a data dashboard that displays both call quality and availability.
“It’s not reactive, it’s pro-active,” Chaffee said. “This gives you the ability to tell ahead of time whether there are any issues, and the ability to prevent or look for outages that might be coming, or call degradation.”
With traditional VoIP monitoring, he added, data can be pulled on problematic calls after the fact, but a company or carrier likely will not know that there are issues until a call cannot be placed or a customer has a bad call quality experience. Fluke’s VoIP monitoring is already being used by companies such as a mining enterprise with far-flung remote location which need telephone access, Chaffee said.
–Anritsu announced it partnered with the Industrial Technology Research Institute to use its MD8475A signaling tester for an LTE WLAN offload test environment in Taiwan as part of Taiwanese government initiative to test Wi-Fi offload in LTE environments. According to Anritsu, the test supports “two types of offloading access (trusted/untrusted) defined by 3GPP, to conduct tests of Wi-Fi access point/controller and dual-mode LTE/Wi-Fi user equipment” in order to validate the AP/controller and dual-mode devices for traffic offloading.
Offload testing services as part of the project are expected to start in the first quarter of this year.
Anritsu is also spotlighting a pair of joint demos at DesignCon 2016 this week: with Teledyne DeCroy for a combined ultra-high-speed PAM4 signal generation, analysis and bit error rate measurement solution; as well as with DVT for integrated testing of signal verification in circuit-board testing.
-Meanwhile, Rohde & Schwarz is giving Embedded World attendees the first look at its new handheld oscilloscope, the R&S Scope Rider, among other solutions.
–Keysight Technologies announced a new “crosstalk” analysis application for its real-time oscilloscopes, designed for getting better insight into the interactions among parallel data lanes within systems.
“As engineers add more data lanes at higher speeds to their designs in an effort to increase data throughput, crosstalk becomes increasingly more likely,” said Dave Cipriani, VP and GM of Keysight’s Oscilloscope and Protocol Division, in a statement.
Keysight went on to note “the need for increased speeds in data communications systems has led to higher data rates and parallel data lanes, which are necessarily placed closer together. The combination of higher bit rates and tightly-spaced lines leads to an increased amount of crosstalk. As a result, crosstalk is becoming a more important problem to diagnose. Power supplies are also an important component. They can create interference on the data lanes they drive in the form of noise and jitter, and they themselves can be susceptible to data-dependent noise such as simultaneous switching noise, which leads to ground bounce.”
Keysight also expanded bit error rate testing support in its M8000 series; now has its UXM wireless test set integrated in Emite’s multiple-input/multiple-output over-the-air testing; and recently announced it completed ISO900:2015 quality management certification from DEKRA Certification.
http://about.keysight.com/en/newsroom/pr/2016/14jan-nrb16001.shtml
