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The radio modem chipset is a key component of 5G devices and access points that connect the next-generation network. Our 5G chip solutions span the network stack, including design and simulation tools, physical layer measurement, high-speed digital standards testing, channel emulation, network emulation, user equipment (UE) emulation, and over-the-air (OTA) testing.
Design and Automation Software
Our electronic design automation (EDA) software products span the application space including high-speed digital, mixed-signal, RF, microwave, and millimeter-wave analog design. Perform electrical, electromagnetic, and thermal simulations of your most complex circuits in a software ecosystem that enables easy test and measurement design and performance verification. Reduce the risk of 5G chip spins and board turns.
5G Design Testing With Emulation
Designing 5G Radio Unit ASIC or System-on-a-Chip (SoC) to sustain O-RAN functions such as beamforming, precoding, IQ decompression, or IFFT for massive MIMO deployments requires a huge amount of work to implement and test. Finding issues early in the design test is essential to avoid costly chip re-spins and to provide robust chipsets fast.
IxVerify 5G O-RAN is aligned with the latest O-RAN specifications and allows 5G O-RU ASIC/SoC design testing in compliance with the industry standards in a fully virtual environment. Keysight’s collaboration with its EDA partners ensures a smooth interaction with the emulators, high usability and testing cycles hundreds of times faster than any other solution on the market.
5G New Radio Solutions
5G New Radio (NR) initial standards are approved and first chipsets are released, setting the stage for large-scale trials and commercial deployments. New millimeter operating bands, wider transmission bandwidths, and new technologies will challenge the way you design, test, and optimize 5G products.
Keysight partnered early with industry leaders to understand the complexities of 5G technology and to develop solutions that span the entire workflow, from simulation, development, and design verification, to conformance and acceptance test, and into manufacturing.
Global Chipset Vendor Accelerates 5G Commercialization
A leading chipset manufacturer needed an over-the-air (OTA) test solution, ranging from sub-6 GHz to millimeter-wave frequencies, to validate their 5G NR device before standards or test methods were complete. They needed a solution that could emulate the network protocols and provide a real-world testing environment while measuring chipset response under different conditions. Using Keysight’s 5G network emulation solutions the customer was able to generate base station protocols to test and optimize 5G signaling and RF in pre-silicon and the final chipset.
Precision High-Speed Digital Interfaces
Mobile device chipset and component integration relies on a collection of high-speed digital specifications. Antennas, chipsets, peripherals, and processors rely on different digital standards to ensure high-bandwidth data transmission without excess power consumption or electromagnetic interference (EMI).
Every generational change of the digital standards used in mobile devices is a potential risk to the performance of your device and your timeline for product introduction. Keysight sits on steering committees and boards of many standards bodies, and our experience testing interconnect standards reduces this risk and helps you accelerate your product introductions.
Make sure you are testing your design against the latest digital interconnect standards to minimize design risk and maximize chipset performance. See Keysight's solutions for the following standards:
RF and Radio Resource Management Testing
5G mobile devices will combine familiar sub-6GHz bands with new MIMO antenna systems, as well as high-frequency millimeter-wave (mmWave) bands with highly-focused beam-steering. With different global spectrum assignments and the need for devices to operate in both non-standalone and standalone use cases, the chipset test matrix is enormous. Device RF testing goes much faster if the device designer is using the same channel and traffic emulation as the carrier architect and chipset designers.
Performing device design-verification testing, radio resource management (RRM), and RF pre-conformance is faster when you use pre-built carrier-compliant test scenarios. Thoroughly test the parametric performance, physical layer, and protocol functionality of your device’s chipset using the same emulated network and channel used by the carriers.
Error Vector Magnitude (EVM) is a one of many key figures of merit measuring noise, interfering signals, and nonlinear distortion. For any key figure of merit of this type, your 5G R&D testbed needs to be significantly better than the device you are measuring. For any of your design's key figures of merit, make sure you are measuring using the same depth as your mobile operator's network equipment manufacturer.
5G Protocol Testing
Every new device carrying a new 5G chipset will have a list of testing to perform: feature bring-up, functional testing, negative testing, regression testing, KPI testing, data throughput test, and overall device performance test.
Make sure your protocol test solution has the most complete protocol stack available on a software platform with fully-developed, carrier-based test cases. You need a single system that handles RF, intermediate frequency (IF), and mmWave frequencies in the most realistic replication of a real-world environment.
5G Chip Makers Innovate Early
Qualcomm Technologies selected Keysight's 5G Protocol R&D Toolset to achieve an industry-first 5G data connection with its Snapdragon™ X50 5G modem chipset. Using a powerful 5G emulation platform allows developers to analyze complex channel conditions more completely and debug unexpected behavior faster.
“Reaching this significant milestone combines the expertise of both companies in driving toward the commercial launch of 5G in 2019,” added Serge Willenegger, senior vice president, product management, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. “We are delighted to work together with Keysight in helping to accelerate our delivery of enhanced mobile broadband experiences to consumers.”
Emulating real-world radio channel conditions
Once you’ve demonstrated stability and high data rates in clean and ideal channel conditions, your next challenge includes validating the mobile device or base station performance under real-world conditions where the channel is non-ideal, complex, faded, and filled with interference.
Make sure you have access to the most reliable tools for characterizing end-to-end system performance of base stations and mobile devices across all 5G NR signal bandwidths and CA schemes by emulating real-world complex 3D fading and interference channel conditions in your lab.
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"Our close 5G collaboration with Keysight, initiated more than two years ago, has resulted in yet another great achievement. Such collaborations have accelerated our ability to power upcoming 5G launches in 2019 and enrich the lives of consumers."
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"MediaTek's active development of 5G technology is bringing reliable and fast broadband to consumers around the world. The joint demonstration with Keysight highlights another pivotal step forward for the rollout of 5G. Device manufacturers working with us can integrate multi-mode modems into their designs and accelerate the delivery of 5G NR mobile devices to the market."
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