NYU WIRELESS has developed what is thought to be the world’s first commercial emulator for 5G millimeter wave (mm-Wave) systems. The emulator differs from the existing paradigm because it performs not only the emulation of the wireless channel, but also of the beamforming antenna arrays on both the transmitter and receiver devices under test (TX and RX DUTs).

Traditional channel emulators for existing 4G systems connect TX and RX DUTs with the emulator over RF using one cable per antenna element. However, cables cannot be connected to mm-Wave phased-array antenna elements operating at an order of magnitude higher than 4G systems. The sheer number of antenna elements and increased gigahertz of bandwidth under which mm-Wave systems operate will require prohibitive frequency stitching.

Read the full article on RF Globalnet.