Merging High-Performance Instruments And FPGAs For Best-In-Class WLAN Measurements

The most recent 802.11 standard presents some challenges as discussed in The Next Evolution of Wireless LAN white paper. It is not surprising that test engineers have been scrambling to find the right test equipment to test this standard. Many test engineers have now realized that the old method of finding an expensive boxed instrument with the best performance numbers is now dead. Why, you may ask? The answer is simple: test engineers are getting starved for resources, mainly time, money, and space. The modern breed of test engineers is already using intuitive new technologies to reduce space and decrease test and development time all in a reduced budget. National Instruments is helping test engineers address these challenges with user-programmable FPGA-based instrumentation. This paper discusses the benefits of using an open field-programmable gate array (FPGA) for 802.11ac testing specifically.