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The Challenge An innovative company decided to invest in the future while maintaining a solid path for backward compatibility. In order to provide a seamless upgrade path for potential customers to take advantage of upcoming standards while allowing the product to operate in today's environment, they developed a single chip that operates over both bands. This was not only a difficult challenge for the chip development, but also provides an interesting challenge for test as well. Developing high frequency products presents many problems. Products are susceptible to external RF radiation. Noise and leakage signals become more obvious and are difficult to control. Temperature variation further affects the stability of the chip. The goal was to develop a test station that could be used for product development and engineering evaluation as well as a baseline for production testing. The Solution For the purpose of supporting an engineering evaluation process, the station had to allow users to change any of the hundreds of test limits and conditions and to provide detailed calibration to ensure very accurate test results. This required quite an extensive suite of tests including both RF parametric testing, as well as protocol level testing designed to ensure that the product meet regulatory standards. Testing high frequency wireless products requires the test station to operate from signals near DC (demodulated base band signal) up to 6GHz (modulated RF signal). Care must be used to select multi-functional instruments and high-quality electronic components including filters, connectors, and shielded cables in order to ensure high quality measurements. Furthermore, cost reduction is important in the current market. The test station provides not only a product-testing system, but also an engineering evaluation platform as well. This required a very delicate balance of test equipment in order to provide the proper level of performance without financially harming the young company. Background Wireless networking products are gaining in popularity as the costs drop and reliability increases. The current standard works in the 2.4GHz band (IEEE-802.11b) with 11Mbps transmission rate. This has a limited amount of spectrum and data rates available. Users are soon looking for a much faster data rate on the 5.8GHz band with the IEEE-802.11a. Based on the use of very complicated modulation schemes such as orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), 802.11a provides data rates up to 54Mbps. There are also propriety rates up to 108Mbps being advertised by some companies. These systems have better immunity to common RF interference problems. Content
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