- Anritsu announced the completion of 5G Standalone (SA) connection testing between Anritsu’s Radio Communication Test Station MT8000A and a mobile smartphone form-factor test device from Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., a subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated, including the company’s 5G modem and antenna modules with integrated RF transceiver, RF front-end and antenna elements.
This achievement follows previous successful joint integration testing of the 5G Non-Standalone (NSA) mode earlier this year. Anritsu has collaborated with Qualcomm Technologies for years on 3G and 4G technologies, helping to support its chipset development, and now delivering 3GPP 5G NR-compliant protocol and RF measurement test solutions for the family of Qualcomm Snapdragon X50 5G modems.
The Standalone (SA) mode uses 5G NR technology to send and receive both data and control signalling between 5G base stations and mobile terminals. With commercial 5G NR SA services expected to start in China in 2019, it is necessary to deliver a connection test environment supporting development of SA mobile terminals.
Anritsu’s 5G NR test solution supports both SA and NSA mobile terminals today and will help to ensure introduction of 5G NR mobile devices for the first rollout of commercial 5G services in early 2019.
With its NSA and SA base-station simulation functionality required for developing 5G chipsets, Anritsu’s Radio Communication Test Station MT8000A supports the latest 5G technologies, including 4×4 MIMO to increase data communication speeds in the sub-6 GHz band. It also supports 8CC for wideband mmWave testing and already covers all 5G frequency bands to be used by the first 5G deployments, as well as 2.5GHz, 3.5GHz, and 4.5GHz in the FR1 band, together with 28 GHz and 39 GHz in the FR2 band.
The MT8000A is a test platform optimized for both protocol and RF testing. The Rapid Test Designer (RTD) software environment delivers an user interface for creating, executing, and analyzing 5G NSA and SA protocol tests, while the complementary RF measurement software suite provides an RF test environment for developers of 5G NR chipsets and mobile terminals.
