Outfitting a wireless comm test bench

摘要

Putting together a test bench for wireless communications encompasses a variety of technologies, components, and considerations. The typical test bench sits on the manufacturing floor and must be capable of running many production tests and supporting the various production lines it serves. In most cases, the test bench is used as a place to troubleshoot devices that have failed one or more tests on a production line. A test bench used for wireless communications must also be configurable. In today's wireless world, technologies have yet to converge as experts had predicted and instead actually seem to be diverging (see Fig. 1). The cellular market has two dominant world standards: GSM and CDMA. Each standard has its own multiple flavors and extensions such as CDMA 2000, W-CDMA, 1xRTT, and GPRS. Less-used standards such as iDEN, TDMA, and analog must be accounted for in test setups.