Guest Column: MIMO: The Future Of Wireless

By Mark Elo, Keithley Instruments, Inc.

Mobile communications, along with the underlying technology that provides voice and data service, is evolving to provide higher data rates in the same frequency spectrum to an ever-growing user base. New communications standards are using multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) techniques to maximize throughput and coverage while preserving bandwidth. MIMO takes spectral efficiency to a new level, but with better spectral efficiency comes a higher level of complexity. This increased complexity poses new testing challenges for design and test engineers.