Cost effective high performance modular instrumentation, signal generation and signal analysis for future mobile communication systems

A decrease in life cycle cost is a key issue for testing of mobile communication systems. The rapid development and edge technology requires high performance instruments and state of the art measurement technology. It is desired to use virtual/synthetic instruments and put the measurement technology in software independent of hardware, i.e. software driven measurements. Increased flexibility and modularization, both in hardware and software, are requirements to support the cost decrease. The hardware basis is signal generation and signal analysis. In this paper state of the art signal generation and signal analysis capabilities are demonstrated in a modular and flexible architecture. A direct IF synthesis is used to generate 1 WideBand Code-Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) carrier with more than 72 dB Adjacent Carrier Leakage Ratio (ACLR) 2 carrier with more than 68 dBc ACLR over a total bandwidth of 100 MHz. The signal analysis capabilities, ACLR performance, for a WCDMA carrier is better than -70 dBc and for a continuous wave better than -85 dBc over a bandwidth of 42.5 MHz. The critical down converter in the set up doesn´t degrade the performance.