Santa Rosa, CA, and Shanghai, China. Keysight Technologies Inc. and Spreadtrum Communications have announced the Spreadtrum-Keysight Innovation Center, located in Shanghai. The center further strengthens the strategic partnership between the two companies, first announced in 2016. The center will provide mobile module design and test services for designers aiming to move forward the next generation of mobile communications innovations. The center also will have technical consultants available to advise on design and test strategies for handling higher frequencies, wider bandwidths, high-speed digital interfaces, and more complicated test requirements under mixed-signal scenarios.
Spreadtrum is a worldwide top 10 fabless semiconductor company that develops the highly integrated, power-efficient chipsets supporting 2G, 3G, and 4G wireless communications standards. For more than a year, Keysight and Spreadtrum have been collaborating on LTE, LTE-Advanced, NB-IoT, MIMO, wideband DPD, and 5G technologies. This includes the entire product design lifecycle—system level simulations, baseband and radio frequency design and verifications, high-speed digital testing, functional measurement, and more.
The Spreadtrum-Keysight Innovation Center is located at the Yaxin Science Park in Zhangjiang High-Tech Park, Pudong District. The Center provides an open test platform with the latest Spreadtrum samples, as well as new technology verification services in LTE/LTE-Advanced, NB-IoT, MIPI, MIMO OTA, and more. In addition, the center will hold on-going technical open-day events in which the semiconductor and measurement experts will deliver the latest technology challenges and solutions, with a goal of accelerating the chip and mobile device product development and testing process.
“The Spreadtrum-Keysight Innovation Center is another milestone to the strategic partnership first announced last year,” said Ron Nersesian, president and CEO of Keysight Technologies. “Keysight is dedicated to providing reliable and complete design and test solutions that help our customers bring mobile devices and communication modules to market faster and at a lower cost.”
“Our collaboration with Keysight will help ensure that our development of wireless technology keeps pace with the rapid change to new standards,” said Dr. Leo Li, chairman and CEO of Spreadtrum. “Spreadtrum has always focused on the customer and we expect that this Joint Innovation Center will allow us to develop a platform for test and verification that our customers can use from day one.”
GCF RF NB-IoT and CAT-M test cases
In related news, Keysight said its Test Platform 195, based on the Keysight T4010S conformance test system with integrated UXM network emulator, includes RF NB-IoT and CAT-M validated test cases in accordance with the Global Certification Forum.
Keysight said that during the most recent Conformance and Interoperability Agreement Group meeting, CAG#50, held April 25-26 in London (www.GlobalCertificationForum.org), the Keysight T4010S conformance test system reached first position in the sum of validated GCF RF NB-IoT test cases and bands as well as first position in RF overall test cases and bands from Release 8 to Release 13.
Following Keysight’s commitment to the CIoT market, Keysight said it offers the only test platform that has validated RF NB-IoT test cases in all currently existing NB-IoT GCF bands.
“Keysight is honored to hold the lead RF position for NB-IoT GCF validations and to be first test platform to validate RF for both NB-IoT and Cat-M,” said Garrett Lees, senior director, Keysight Wireless Solutions. “This demonstrates an example of Keysight’s commitment to the CIoT industry, and we will continue providing the most comprehensive CIoT solutions for our customers as the technology evolves.”
The Keysight T4010S test system is a complete solution covering LTE/LTE-Advanced RF and RRM to RF NB-IoT/Cat-M test capabilities according to 3GPP standards during different stages of the product development from early design and verification stages to the full UE certification. The integration of the Keysight UXM network emulator simplifies the development and verification tasks helping customers bring reliable CIoT enabled devices to market more quickly.
