National Instruments Showcases 5G Test with Skyworks

NI announced that it is coordinating with Skyworks Solutions, Inc. to test products from their breakthrough Sky5 unifying platform enabling revolutionary 5G applications. The companies will jointly demonstrate Skyworks’ 5G New Radio (NR) devices at the GTI Summit in Shanghai, China on June 25 and 26.

The imminent deployment of 5G NR networks in the 3.3 GHz to 5.0 GHz bands is driving rapid innovation across RF front-end architectures. Consumer demand for enhanced mobile broadband technology requires new 5G NR designs to support considerably wider bandwidths and new frequency bands while maintaining power budgets appropriate for mobile devices. To meet early demand for sub-6 GHz 5G NR use cases, Skyworks has developed fully integrated solutions that feature up to 200 MHz of bandwidth and are designed to support mobile architectures.

Skyworks used NI’s software-defined PXI platform to quickly and accurately verify the RF and DC performance of its integrated products. NI’s test software features up to 1 GHz of instantaneous bandwidth through its RF vector signal transceiver (VST) technology and advanced DC measurement quality. As a result, NI customers can address a wide range of 5G NR measurement requirements, including testing for carrier aggregation and wideband DPD conditions.

“Skyworks is pleased to be utilizing NI’s RF VST to validate performance of our Sky5 solutions for 5G NR applications,” said Kevin Walsh, senior director of Mobile Marketing for Skyworks. “Using NI’s PXI platform, we are able to validate key performance benchmarks.”