National Instruments Corporation

Syed Jaffar Shah

Christopher J Behnke

Edward B Loewenstein

Mohamad A Zeidan

Techniques are disclosed related to determining a modulation quality measurement of a device-under-test (DUT). A modulated signal is received from a source a plurality of times, and each received modulated signal is transmitted to each of a first vector signal analyzer (VSA) and a second VSA. The first VSA and the second VSA demodulate the received modulated signals to produce first error vectors and second error vectors, respectively. A cross-correlation calculation is performed on the first error vectors and second error vectors of respective received modulated signals to produce a cross-correlation measurement, and the cross-correlation measurement is averaged over the plurality of received modulated signals. A modulation quality measurement is determined based on the averaged cross-correlation measurement.

Cross-correlation measurements for modulation quality measurements

Dynamic characterization of complex high-order nonlinearity in transmitter (TX) and receiver (RX) signal chains of transceiver systems can be efficiently and accurately performed. A loopback connection may be used to facilitate self-characterization. Appropriate RX and TX configuration settings may be developed to facilitate de-coupling of individual RX and TX nonlinearities from measured cascade nonlinearity. The system's high-order response to a two-tone signal generation may be measured, and complex mathematical analysis may be performed to identify and isolate passband nonlinear components to extract a high-order memory-less model for the system. The extracted system model may be used in the corrective and non-iterative pre-distortion of generated signals and in the post-distortion of received signals to improve linearity performance of the transceiver. The memory-less model and the analytical system are effective in improving performance of class-A-amplifier-based signal chains that are common in test and measurement systems and channel emulation systems.

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Austin, TX, United States of America

Syed Jaffar Shah