Agilent Technologies Inc. and Lime Microsystems have announced a custom pairing of test equipment, transceiver technology and control software that constitutes a new method for testing and evaluating advanced wireless systems. The evaluation platform, which includes a suite of test equipment and software, saves today’s digital and software-defined radio designer’s development time and cuts optimization cycles, helping to speed new products to market.

“Combining the transceiver platform from Lime Microsystems with our suite of test equipment has given designers a comprehensive, cost-effective method for design validation, even for multi-standard radios,” said Robert Drollinger, Marketing Manager at Agilent. “We are delighted to offer RF designers this combination of tools and equipment to help solve this test and evaluation challenge.”

“The LMS6002D flexible transceiver [from Lime Microsystems] is gaining traction in a wide variety of market sectors, including cellular small cells, software defined radios, public safety and land mobile radios,” said Dale Wilson, Director of Marketing at Lime Microsystems. “Our joint efforts with Agilent have enabled our customers to evaluate our product quickly and efficiently, resulting in highly effective customer support for a wide community of users.”

The Lime Microsystems evaluation platform and associated control software allows users to adjust the transceiver’s uplink and downlink frequencies from 300 MHz to 3.8 GHz, with no gaps, and to set the on-chip channel filters to accommodate all cellular standards. With Agilent test equipment and the transceiver from Lime, customers can generate digital IQ signals using a pattern generator, convert these signals to RF, and analyze the RF signals with Agilent’s vector signal analyzer software on an Agilent spectrum analyzer or wideband oscilloscope.

This setup is supported by a comprehensive set of Agilent software tools, coupled with the Lime user interface, for optimizing the RF parameters on a given standard or frequency band, providing a simple and fast method for configuring the Lime transceiver.