Don't worry, be happy: Design, test, verification support for LTE-Advanced is here

The fast-moving world of mobile communications can be a designer's dream or nightmare, as you work to understand the stringent requirements and then design, evaluate, and verify performance of hardware, algorithms, and software. It's a jungle of standards out there, as the evolution of wireless 1990 to 2011 (courtesy of Agilent Technologies) clearly shows:

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LTE-Advanced (Long Term Evolution-Advanced) brings severe test challenges:

• More complexity to the physical layer
• Carrier aggregation, where simultaneous transceivers create interference within the user equipment or base station
• Clustered SC-FDMA, which adds to amplifier design issues, and creates opportunity for in-channel and adjacent-channel spur generation
• MIMO, with more antennas, more complexity, especially as is is hard to design a multiband, MIMO antenna to fit within the space in the handset
• And the need to coexist with 2G and 3G cellular systems

Coincident with the Mobile World Congress, Agilent  is unveiling several products targeted at LTE-Advanced. These include Signal Studio software and 89600B Vector Signal Analysis software for LTE Advanced support, for the generation and analysis of FDD and TDD signals complaint with the 3GPP Release 10 standard. Among the features:

• FDD and TDD per 3GPP Release 10 for both uplink and downlink signal configurations;
• carrier aggregation for both contiguous and non-contiguous component carrier configurations for up to 100 MHz I/Q bandwidth using Agilent’s MXG vector signal generators and up to 140 MHz analysis bandwidth with the Agilent PXA signal analyzer;
• independent setup parameters for each component carrier, including any LTE-Advanced specified bandwidth or modulation type;
• simultaneous analysis of up to five component carriers, a feature unique to the 89600B, and troubleshooting of each component carrier using a rich selection of measurements, including EVM, CCDF and more; and
• enhanced uplink-clustered SC-FDMA and simultaneous control and data channel (PUCCH and PUSCH) support.

 For example, the 89600B can characterize up to five component carriers simultaneously, and allow users to set up and view different measurements on each:

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The Signal Studio shows the spectrum of LTE-Advanced configurations, such as this one with four 20-MHz component carriers:

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These join the recently announced W1918 LTE-Advanced library which lets designers of systems and algorithms for 8x8 MIMO LTE-Advanced start with a library of over 170 reference designs for baseband models and toolbenches. With this library, users can download algorithms in C++, .m, or VHDL/Verilog formats, as well as test vectors for ongoing hardware verification and validation:

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Availability: the various components of the LTE-Advanced program are available now or will be shortly. For more information, go to http://www.agilent.com/find/lte .