"The rapid growth of the WiMAX market and the introduction of WiMAX Wave 2 Certification for MIMO devices have expanded the use cases and number of players in the industry," said Pete Paglia, vice president of worldwide sales and business development at Azimuth Systems. "In response to the growing demand for high-performance MIMO test solutions, we have expanded our ACE 400WB product to provide a broader range of users with the benefit of choosing the test configuration that offers them the most appropriate flexibility and price."

Following the ACE 400WB's extremely successful introduction into the WiMAX market in 2007, the new ACE models and enhanced configurations will allow the ACE 400WB to scale to meet the RF testing needs for different users. Configurations from full 4x4 to multiple 2x2, uni-directional or bi-directional are all supported with simple configuration and no re-cabling required.

In addition, Azimuth has added enhanced multi-link capabilities to the current ACE 400WB that will also be included in all new models. Multi-link will enable broad flexibility of topology configuration controlled from the GUI, allowing different models, velocities and devices to be combined effortlessly. Multi-link supports unique use cases, such as testing multiple mobile stations connected to a single base station for collaborative uplink or testing handoff of a single mobile station between two base stations. The flexibility of configuration and multi-link capabilities make the ACE the only channel emulator suited to all the conformance, performance and interoperability testing needs of WiMAX and Wi-Fi.

"As 4G wireless technologies, such as WiMAX today and LTE, UMB or 802.16m in the near future, are developed and deployed, the ACE platform will scale to address the specific needs of the vendors in these 4G markets," said Graham Celine, senior director of marketing at Azimuth Systems. "Azimuth's ACE 400WB is the only channel emulator optimized for MIMO tests, supporting bi-directional and mobility testing, and providing the RF fidelity required for advanced modulation techniques such as 64QAM."

Designed from the ground up as a MIMO test solution, Azimuth's ACE 400WB is purpose-built for testing mobile broadband wireless equipment like WiMAX and LTE. Mobility, high throughput and extended range are dependent on the multipath environment for MIMO spatial streaming and advanced antenna techniques. The ACE 400WB implements real-time emulation of over-the-air conditions and is a highly precise instrument, ensuring that introduced channel fading is as close to the real world as possible. The ACE 400WB's RF characteristics are designed specifically to meet the high fidelity requirements of MIMO and beamforming communications like those used in WiMAX and Wi-Fi, so that performance and interoperability can be easily and more cost-effectively validated in the lab, saving hundreds of hours or even days of costly and uncontrolled field experimentation.

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