NI unveils first RF VNA in compact PXI form factor

Phil Hester, the Senior Vice President of Research and development at National Instruments, comments: "The 6GHz VNA demonstrates our continued investment in delivering RF solutions that help engineers increase test accuracy and throughput while reducing setup cost, size and complexity. We are proud to add this VNA to our already strong and growing RF portfolio of PXI modular instruments."

The NI PXIe-5630 is optimised for automated test with a mature feature set including automatic precision calibration, full vector analysis on both ports, reference plane extensions and a flexible LabVIEW API that is suitable for parallel test. In addition, the VNA delivers advanced performance specifications including a frequency range of 10MHz to 6GHz, a wide dynamic range of greater than 110dB, and sweep speeds of less than 400 microseconds/point over 3201 points. Because of its PXI configuration, engineers can combine up to eight NI PXIe-5630 modules in a single PXI chassis and perform multisite RF tests in true parallel fashion.

Programming

Engineers can control the NI PXIe-5630 interactively using its full-featured soft front panel, or programmatically using APIs for NI LabVIEW software and NI LabWindows/CVI ANSI C development environments. Both APIs are optimised for multicore processing to facilitate parallel test of multiple RF components, which provides a significant throughput advantage over sequential, switched testing.

The PXIe-5630 further expands NI's existing wide selection of PXI modular instrumentation for automated test. As an added benefit of its industry-standard PXI configuration, the VNA integrates with more than 1500 PXI instruments from NI and more than 70 other vendors to address the requirements of many test applications.

Follow the link to find out more about the NI PXIe-5630, which will be available in October 2010.