Rapid development and porting of new waveforms for Synthetic Instrumentation

Changing standards and newly defined waveforms make keeping up with test requirements without the purchase of new, expensive measurement systems or software is desirable. The Long Term Evolution (LTE) Advanced, Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials Project 25 (APCO-25 or P25), and TErrestrial Trunked RAadio (TETRA) standards are a few examples of developing standards changing requirements for test equipment. With the move to digital communications, test systems are faced with additional new test requirements and methods of measurement. Instead of implementing independent specific waveform options into the Digital Signal Processing (DSP) algorithms of the synthetic instrument a more generic algorithm design method is implemented and described in this paper. With the development of generic digital modulation and demodulation algorithms, rapid development and porting of new waveforms becomes possible.