Submitted by Keysight Technologies

In many application areas, including radar/electronic warfare, satellite as well as wireless communication, the modulation bandwidth requirements keep increasing into the range of up to 4 GHz and beyond. At the same time, elaborate scenarios with multiple transmitters and receivers must be emulated to verify correct functionality of transmission systems with complex functionality such as beam steering in wireless comms or target identification in radar. Some applications even require real-time signal processing because they need to react immediately upon an incoming signal.

Existing test solutions typically offer either wide bandwidth or streaming and real-time processing capabilities, but not both. Keysight’s new Wideband Solution Platform combines those strengths and adds scalability in terms of the number of synchronous channels and streaming throughput.

This Wideband Solution Platform consists of a portfolio of compatible instruments, including digitizer, arbitrary waveform generator, digital signal processor and mass storage modules that can be combined in a flexible way, depending on application needs. The interconnect between these products is based on the optical data interface (ODI) that is standardized by the AXIe Consortium.

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By Larry Desjardin, Modular Methods

This is the third of a three-part series examining the health risks, if any, posed by 5G. In Part 1, we examined the potential ionization and thermal health risks posed by 5G. These are the conventional risks recognized by the FCC. In that column, I concluded that both effects were manageable. Ionization is not a risk at mmWave frequencies because a mmWave photon doesn’t have the energy to remove an electron from an atom. Thermal effects were also minimal and could only occur by placing a transmitter next to the skin. Even that situation was easily avoided by using headphones or placing a cell phone in speakerphone mode. 

In Part 2, we examined electromagnetic (EM) effects. Here, the outcome was not so clear. After examining a series of studies, I concluded that there could well be negative impacts from electromagnetic radiation. 


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Submitted by Conduant Corporation

At Keysight Technologies, the push for bigger, better, and faster solutions is constant. The engineers at Keysight Laboratories, the company’s central applied research lab, focus on moving test and measurement technology forward, often in cooperation with Keysight’s vendors. Usually these developments happen in steps. Recently, a leap was required.

In 2016, Keysight Labs saw that the data transfer speeds in Keysight’s test and measurement solutions were reaching a limit. Tests needed to support higher frequencies and provide better fidelity, leading to larger data streams at higher speeds. At the time, Gen 3 PXIe technology could move data at a theoretical maximum speed of 8 GB/s (64 Gb/s), and while the PXIe consortiums have defined faster standards, the limit in practice is still lower. It’s a technical problem that hasn’t yet been solved. A different solution was needed.

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