LTX-Credence Debuts Low Cost System for Connectivity Devices

December 10, 2012. LTX-Credence has announced its first product under the new Nighthawk brand—the Nighthawk_CT system for testing high-volume price-sensitive RF connectivity devices.

Nighthawk_CT leverages the company's DSP and RF expertise to fit quad-site RF test capability into a compact, laptop sized RF system. The system can add RF capability to any of the company's Diamond systems or X-Series systems in the field—upgrades typically take 30 minutes, company officials report. Nighthawk_CT supports Zigbee, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, and DVB devices as well as devices supporting proprietary RF implementations.

Company officials say the system cuts test cost by more than 50% compared with traditional competitive solutions while avoiding the lower capital utilization that can occur when testing connectivity devices on large, expensive, massively parallel RF testers.

Nighthawk_CT offers a wide IF bandwidth to support test of emerging 802.11ac devices. Embedded DSP enhances dynamic range and boosts throughput. An annual calibration strategy eliminates the need for costly calibration hardware on site. A tester can be configured with two Nighthawk_CT systems to support eight-site test. Nighthawk_CT will be released to manufacturing in the first calendar quarter of 2013.

“In our view, Nighthawk_CT represents revolutionary technology,” said David Tacelli, LTX-Credence president and CEO. “This new product, two years in the making, represents innovation at the highest level by leveraging 30 years of experience developing RF test solutions. Our beta customers are extremely impressed with the performance, speed, size, and reliability of the product. We anticipate Nighthawk_CT will be a significant advantage for the company when competing for business in the connectivity space.”