Telecom Lead America: National Instruments has released the NI 5791 RF transceiver adapter module for NI FlexRIO, which is being used in multiple research projects on 5G technologies.
The module forms a SDR solution when paired with an NI FlexRIO FPGA module for real-time, user-designed processing. Through triggering mechanisms provided by the PXI platform, users can synchronize eight or more transceivers for MIMO and beamforming configurations. The NI 5791 comes with FPGA digital signal processing (DSP) libraries and example architectures for common signal processing applications.
The combination of the NI FlexRIO FPGA module and the NI 5791 is based on the same software technology developed for the world’s first vector signal transceiver (VST). This single-software framework using NI LabVIEW system design software enables faster prototyping in physical layer design applications.
NI’s graphical system design solution provides a unified design flow for engineers and researchers working on wireless technologies to implement algorithms in FPGA hardware and on multicore processors without target-specific knowledge such as HDL or multithreaded programming.
The NI 5791 adapter module is the latest addition to the NI SDR platform that includes the NI USRP (Universal Software Radio Peripheral), as well as instrumentation-grade, PXI-based software-designed instruments.
“The NI 5791 delivers superior RF performance needed to develop wide bandwidth software defined radios,” said James Kimery, director of RF/communications lead user programs at National Instruments. “The combination of the NI 5791, NI FlexRIO and LabVIEW enables researchers investigating leading wireless technologies to rapidly prototype and innovate faster.”
Product Features:
- Tunable RF transceiver covers 200 MHz to 4.4 GHz
- Up to 100 MHz real-time bandwidth at 16 bits
- Large Xilinx DSP-focused FPGAs for real-time signal processing
- System design based on LabVIEW with included DSP libraries
- High-speed, low-latency PXI Express x4 (~800 MB/s) connection to the host
