Extending the Bandwidth and Dynamic Range of Old RF Instruments to Meet State-of-the-Art Performance, Using a Synthetic Instrument Approach

A decrease in life cycle cost is a key issue for testing mobile communication systems. The rapid development and edge technology requires high-performance instruments and state-of-the-art measurement technology. New investments are expensive, but even older generation instruments are capable of extending their bandwidth and dynamic range to meet even the latest Third-Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) cellular measurement requirements by the addition of external hardware using a synthetic instrument approach. The novelty of this paper is the high performance on the most crucial parameters, i.e., the dynamic range and bandwidth achieved by only replacing some parts of the legacy instrument. Moreover, the demonstrated direct IF synthesis has a high degree of novelty at wide modulation bandwidths. It is desired to use virtual/synthetic instruments and make the signal processing in the software independent of the hardware, i.e., software-defined measurements (SDMs). In this paper, a state-of-the-art experimental setup for signal generation and signal analysis is demonstrated. A direct IF synthesis is used to generate a wideband code-division multiple-access (WCDMA) carrier with more than 72-dB adjacent carrier leakage ratio (ACLR) up to 12 parallel carriers with more than 68-dBc ACLR over a total bandwidth of 100 MHz. The signal analysis capabilities (e.g., ACLR performance) for a WCDMA carrier is better than $-$70 dBc and for a continuous wave better than $-$ 85 dBc over a bandwidth of 42.5 MHz. The critical RF downconverter in the setup is carefully designed not to degrade the dynamic range performance.