NI intros PXI Express reconfigurable IF transceiver

AUSTIN, USA: National Instruments announced the NI PXIe-5641R RIO IF transceiver, the company's most recent device for RF test.

The NI PXIe-5641R is a dual-input, dual-output module that combines an intermediate frequency (IF) transceiver with reconfigurable I/O (RIO) capability using a Xilinx Virtex-5 SX95T field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and PXI Express technology.

With this new module, engineers can take advantage of the flexibility of the NI LabVIEW FPGA Module and the performance of PXI Express for applications such as RF test, software-defined radio, signal intelligence and communication system design.

With the NI PXIe-5641R IF transceiver, engineers have the ability to incorporate customized, real-time RF stimulus and response into their test, measurement and communication systems through user-programmable FPGAs on RIO hardware. The test hardware then becomes protocol-aware, dynamically changing measurements and stimuli based on the response of the device under test.

Protocol-aware or real-time test is beneficial in applications such as RFID tag testing, cellular base station emulation or any hardware-in-the-loop RF testing. For communications applications such as software-defined radio and signal intelligence, engineers can use FPGAs to prototype and implement new communication standards and perform real-time signal analysis and event detection.

The NI PXIe-5641R has two 14-bit, 100 MS/s analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) with built-in 20 MHz bandwidth digital downconverters (DDCs), and two 14-bit, 200 MS/s digital-to-analog converters (DACs) with built-in 20 MHz bandwidth digital upconverters (DUCs).

Because of these NI RF upconverters and downconverters, the NI PXIe-5641R can support RF frequencies up to 2.7 GHz, making the module ideal for spectral monitoring and signal intelligence as well as real-time RF test. Engineers can take full advantage of the NI PXIe-5641R by using the LabVIEW FPGA Module, which extends the LabVIEW graphical development environment to target NI RIO hardware.