Instruments are getting more and more complicated & are growing at a rate faster than ever before. With advancements in technology and increasing demand of users, manufacturers are required to, and are able to, bring in more features into a single instrument, while trying to maintain or decrease the cost, size and power requirements at the same time. Engineers and scientists across the globe invest a lot of time and efforts into finding out alternatives of our current technologies to meet these requirements of users and manufactures. Because of the very same reason, because of the technological advancements, the better processing capabilities, improved tools, we do see lot of technological innovations coming up every single day.

Field of radio and microwave communication is not left behind in this technological revolution. The number of wireless devices, diversity of communication standards, and sophistication of modulation schemes are increasing dramatically each year. With the help of better algorithms, improved bus speeds, processing power supported by technologies like FPGA, engineers have been able to develop standards capable of transferring data at speed higher than ever, utilising channel bandwidth to its maximum.

With improved technologies and requirements, the cost of testing wireless devices using traditional approach has also increased exponentially, as multiple equipments with even greater complexity are needed to perform test on DUT. One way to reduce the cost while maintaining complexity of the test is by taking advantage of software designed instrumentation. This new and innovative approach enables RF test engineers to achieve test time reduction that are of the order of magnitude beyond what was possible without custom or standard-specific instrumentation.

The recently introduced world’s first Vector Signal Transceiver (VST), the NI PXIe 5644R/45R, uses the same approach for testing and measurement. A VST is a new class of instrument that combines a Vector Signal Generator and a Vector Signal Analyzer with FPGA based real-time signal processing and control. The world’s first VST from National Instruments also features a user-programmable FPGA, which allows custom algorithm to be implemented directly into the hardware design of the instrument. This software-designed approach allows a VST to have the flexibility of software-defined radio architecture with RF instrument class performance. Backed by software to support the latest RF standards, including 802.11ac, NI vector signal transceivers boast the performance and flexibility of an R&D-grade box instrument with the speed, low cost, and small form factor of a manufacturing test system.

No matter how good and tempting the specs look, any instrument will be as easy to use as tools using which we can use it. NI VST is no exception to that. The NI VST uses LabVIEW FPGA Module to extend the LabVIEW system design software to target FPGAs on NI reconfigurable I/O (RIO) hardware. LabVIEW is well suited for FPGA programming because it clearly represents parallelism and data flow, so users who are both experienced and inexperienced in traditional FPGA design can productively apply the power of reconfigurable hardware.  As a system design software, LabVIEW is uniquely capable of blending processing done on an FPGA and a microprocessor (in your PC environment) in a way that does not require extensive knowledge of computing architectures and data manipulation. This is crucial for assembling modern communications test systems.

NI VST software is built on this powerful LabVIEW FPGA and NI RIO architecture, and features a multitude of starting points for your application including application IP, reference designs, examples, and LabVIEW sample projects. These starting points all feature default LabVIEW FPGA personalities and prebuilt FPGA bitfiles to help you get started quickly. Without these out-of-the-box capabilities, the productivity of LabVIEW, and the well-crafted application/firmware architecture, the software-designed nature of the VST would be challenging for many classes of users. With these traits, however, it brings unprecedented levels of customisability to high-end instrumentation.