NI announced its LabVIEW Communications System Design Suite with software defined radio (SDR) hardware for the 5G telecom network market.
LabVIEW Communications System Design Suite combines software defined radio (SDR) hardware with a software design flow to assist engineers to prototype 5G systems. 5G will become a reality by 2020 with telecom network vendors such as Ericsson and Huawei playing an active role.
NI said the LabVIEW Communications environment enables the entire design team to map an idea from algorithm to FPGA using a single representation to empower designers to focus on innovation instead of implementation in order to increase the rate and quality of their prototyping.
Technische Universitat Dresden is currently using NI hardware and software integration in the 5G exploration.
“The use of the NI platform enabled TU Dresden researchers to significantly compress the time to transition from concept to prototype. In six weeks, we were able to have a working prototype. Using other standard tools, this process would have taken us more than two years to complete,” said Gerhard Fettweis, Vodafone chair at Technische Universitat Dresden.
Since LabVIEW Communications is optimized for the SDR platform with a hardware-aware design environment, there will be enough added flexibility of the hardware to the software. The integrated solution assists designers to achieve optimal performance by eliminating the need to manually map algorithms to different hardware architectures.
LabVIEW Communications includes built-in application frameworks for WiFi and LTE that enable wireless prototypers to focus on innovating specific components of existing standards rather than designing a new algorithm from scratch.
“For some of the academic and industry researchers in our lead user program, this approach has cut the time to a validated prototype in half,” said James Kimery, director of RF and Communications at NI.
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