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Keysight Technologies, Inc., a leading technology company that delivers advanced design and validation solutions to help accelerate innovation to connect and secure the world, has delivered a range of enhancements to the company’s 5G Network Emulation Solution that support the latest 3GPP Rel-15/16/17 features and enable leading chipset and device makers to quickly and confidently develop designs with advanced 5G capabilities for consumer, industry and government applications.

Over the past year, the new updates have enabled leading 5G chipset makers to develop and verify the performance of advanced 5G chipsets based on 3GPP release 16 (Rel-16), supporting new features and capabilities. Expected to be introduced to market in 2022, these chipsets have already been tested and verified using Keysight’s enhanced 5G network emulation solution, based on the company’s UXM 5G Wireless Test Platform. Keysight has used the enhanced network emulation platform to realise several industry-first 5G achievements in collaboration with these leading chipset makers. Industry milestone achievements include the first 10 Gbps downlink (DL) IP data throughput demonstration in June 2021 and the first 3.5 Gbps UL IP data throughput demonstration in January 2022.

“We’re pleased to enable a global 5G ecosystem to capture early market revenue opportunities by delivering industry-first enhancements to Keysight’s Network Emulation portfolio, providing double the capabilities of the original solution launched in 2017,” said Cao Peng, Vice President and General Manager at Keysight’s wireless test group. “We’re witnessing the first commercial deployments of 3GPP Rel-16 this spring and expect to see early implementations of Rel-17 towards the end of 2022. Keysight’s 5G test solutions have, and will continue to, provide a future-proof test platform for chipset makers, device manufacturers, mobile network operators, test labs, system integrators and operational technology (OT) vendors to rapidly develop and verify 5G devices and networks.”

Key enhancements to Keysight’s network emulation platform include:

• Extended frequency range (FR) coverage, providing support for the sub-8GHz FR1 extension into the new licenced and unlicenced bands (NR-U), high intermediate frequency (IF) support for FR2 testing and the new 47 GHz mmWave FR2 band n262.
• Flexible use of new wider bandwidth RF resources to provide superior EN-DC and NR-DC band combination coverage, providing one-box support for eight component carriers (CC) in 8 FDD/TDD bands with 4×4/2×2 MIMO.
• Increased processing power to support more carrier aggregation (CA) with >10CC, and higher data throughput rates beyond 10 Gbps end-to-end IP for data-intensive use cases, including 8K video streaming.
• Enhanced uplink (UL) capabilities to support UL antennae switching, multi-Angle of Arrival (AoA) testing and more CCs for UL CA to enable HD video and image sharing and livestream use cases.
• New Rel-16 Ultra Reliability & Low Latency Communication (URLLC) features, enabling devices serving the Industrial IoT (IIoT), Private Networks, Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) and extended reality (XR) markets.
• Comprehensive multi-SIM support, including Dual-SIM Dual-Active (DSDA) for 5G/4G network combinations.

Keysight’s 5G network emulation solution leverages the company’s UXM 5G Wireless Test Platform, an integrated and compact signalling test platform with multiformat stack support, rich processing power and abundant radio frequency (RF) resources, to emulate a 5G new radio (NR) network. The UXM 5G platform supports RF characterisation, protocol compliance and functional key performance analytics across both sub-6GHz and mmWave spectrum. Solution updates are available in a range of new platform configurations and price points to support RF protocol, functional and performance use cases across the device workflow.

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