Aiming to meet the U.S. Department of Defense’s (DOD) NxTest vision for flexible, morphable modular instrumentation, Agilent Technologies last month demonstrated its high-performance microwave synthetic instruments (SI) at Autotestcon. As per the definition of the SI working group, synthetic instrument is a collection of hardware and software modules that can be concatenated together to emulate a standard instrument.

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As part of its new LXI (LAN extensions for instrumentation) format, these instruments include:

• 20 GHz high-performance upconverter with >1 GHz modulation bandwidth, based on PSG vector signal generator.
• 26.5 GHz high-performance downconverter with >170 dB of measurement range with a superior noise floor, based on the PSA series spectrum analyzer.
• 20 Msample/s high-dynamic range digitizer, based on the PSA
• Wideband arbitrary waveform generator with 500 MHz of instantaneous analog bandwidth.
• 40 GHz wideband peak and average power meter with 100 Msample/s continuous sampling rate and 30 MHz video bandwidth, based on the new P-series power meters.
• Family of general-purpose microwave switch matrices with switching bandwidth up to 50 GHz, based on 34980A multifunction switch/measure unit.
• Application software with flexible demodulation and analysis capability, based on 89600 VSA software.

According to Agilent, users can design high-performance automated test systems (ATS) with Agilent’s traditional microwave products and then build the operational ATS system with synthetic instrument counterparts when they become available in 2005. Agilent’s synthetic instruments are slated for release in late 2005.

Others in the synthetic instrument race include Aeroflex Inc., Phase Matrix and DRT Inc. In fact, Aeroflex also announced that it has integrated National Instruments' NI TestStand development system into its high-performance synthetic microwave test systems. NI TestStand is a test management environment that provides a standard test sequencing capability for a variety of test applications, enabling Aeroflex customers to develop their own test sequences using an industry-standard platform. It is now available as an option for the Aeroflex TRM 1000C and the STI 1000C synthetic broadband microwave test systems.

"The addition of NI TestStand to the TRM and STI synthetic test systems is a natural fit that takes advantage of the open and flexible measurement architecture of our products," said Mark Jurovich, general manager, Aeroflex systems division, Powell, Ohio. "The additional capability provides customers with another method to access the wide variety of modular software products and a powerful measurement suite within the Aeroflex synthetic platform for advanced microwave test applications. They will also realize the benefits of standardizing test sequencing on an industry-standard product like NI TestStand."