PALO ALTO, Calif. -- Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: A) today announced the release of the first commercially available test solution for the CPRI (Common Public Radio Interface) standard. CPRI defines a publicly available specification for the interface between the radio equipment control (REC) and the radio equipment (RE) in a radio base station.

The Agilent N5120A Baseband Studio for CPRI radio equipment test software is an off-the-shelf, full-featured CPRI test solution that provides the REC signals required to stimulate 3G base station RE. Used with the N5101A PCI card and the N5103A high-speed serial interface card for operation, this solution is suitable for manufacturing test engineers testing mobile communication base-station RE and provides the flexibility to support R&D engineers.

Compared with more conventional homegrown solutions, the N5120A features a significant time savings in terms of both test system development and implementation. Its support of bi-directional uplink/downlink operation makes it suitable for concurrent testing of the receive and transmit functions of base station equipment. A real-time Bit Error Rate (BER)/Block Error Rate (BLER) testing capability enables testing of receiver sensitivity.

Using the N5120A, the engineer can set up carriers and waveforms to send to the RE (downlink). Received CPRI data from the RE can be directed to a disk file, vector signal analysis program or BER measurement utility (uplink). The engineer can also send control and management data to control the RE and receive it from the RE.

"PMC-Sierra and Agilent Technologies have been working closely together to bring to market a standard-compliant test solution consisting of CPRI-based ICs and test equipment," said Babak Samimi, product marketing manager with PMC-Sierra's Communication Products Division. "Interoperability between Agilent's test equipment and our CPRI-based architecture demonstrates successful implementation of this new industry standard."

Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: A)