Whitepaper

Cost-Effective Design of Wireless Test Systems with FPGA-Based Channel Emulation

Channel emulation is the ability to effectively simulate real-world atmospheric conditions that may arise and impair an electromagnetic wave. This allows an engineer in the lab to test how a wireless device such as a cellular telephone, military radio, or wireless modem will perform under specific impairment conditions, then optimize the design to operate in these conditions. Common atmospheric impairments include phase noise, multi-path/fading, Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN), and burst/impulse noise. Any one of these impairments could lead to degradation of a wireless device’s transmitted or received signal quality, causing intermittent or a complete loss of communication and rendering the device ineffective.