Sevana: Test and Measurement: New NFC standards focus on RF, interoperability

The NFC Forum has released one new and three candidate specifications for near-field communications, which target improved radio frequency support, better interoperability and a new tag operation format that opens up new use cases, according to the organization.

The new NFC standard deals with NFC device interactions with NFC Forum Type 5 tags, also known as ISO/IEC 15693 tags. The three candidate NFC standards include defining analog characteristics of the RF interface of an NFC device and specifying external radio signals without placing requirements on antenna design; defining and expanding the “building blocks” for setting up the RF protocol for various roles inside an NFC device; and defining the digital portion of the RF protocol that NFC devices use.

– Ixia has launched a new enterprise network security solution called ThreatArmor, designed to reduce potential attack sources, identify and block malicious traffic and cut down on the number of false alarms that can produce “security alert fatigue”, according to the company.

“As many recent breaches demonstrate, indications of intrusions and data exfiltration attempts are usually flagged through internal security alerts long before the intrusion is actually discovered. But determining the critical alerts is like trying to find a needle in a haystack, given the sheer number of security alerts that must be analyzed daily,” said Dennis Cox, chief product officer at Ixia, in a statement. “ThreatARMOR delivers a new level of visibility and security by blocking unwanted traffic before many of these unnecessary security events are ever generated. And its protection is always up to date thanks to our Application and Threat Intelligence program.”

-Changes in the European test equipment market reflect a growing preference for rentals, according to research from Frost & Sullivan, because of reduced acquisition and total cost of ownership. The firm believes that “the share of rental and leasing services in the test and measurement industry could represent close to a third of the total market revenues in the future.”

Image: Frost & Sullivan

Jessy Cavazos, industry director for Frost’s test and measurement practice, said that “there is significant room for growth for the rental and leasing services market in the test and measurement industry in Europe with penetration currently fairly low in most countries. Rentals are a good fit for customers who have short requirements, cannot afford buying the test instruments, or are in an industry evolving at a fast pace from a technological standpoint accelerating instrument obsolescence.”

–Cobham Wireless recently launched a new all-in-one wireless testing solution for base stations and small cells, the TM500 and E500 Multi-RAT Network Test Solution, which focuses on interactions among 4G and legacy technologies, such as handovers. Cobham describes the system as an “all-in-one hardware and software platform that can validate the capacity and performance of mobile base stations and networks across three types of overlaid Radio Access Technology (RAT) – LTE/LTE-A (4G), WCDMA/HSPA+ (3G) and GSM (2G).”

–Anritsu and Comprion have collaborated on a new offering that completely automates LTE protocol conformance testing for mobile devices.

This wasn’t previously possiblebecause of the requirements for specific USIM profiles, which meant manual USIM changes had to be made, according to Anritsu. The new solution combines Comprion’s Test SIM Simulator with Anritsu’s ME7834 Protocol Conformance Test System and allows USIMs to be automatically reconfigured, in real-time, as 3GPP TS 36.523 tests are run.

“The result is that no manual intervention is required,” Anritsu said, adding that this means “improving overall testing efficiency, enabling complete campaigns to be run overnight or over a weekend and freeing up valuable test engineering time.”

–Keysight Technologies this week launched new debugging software for some of its equipment, expanded the signal processing capabilities of its M9703B 12-bit AXIe high-speed digitizer/wideband digital receiver, and introduced a new logic analyzer module for high-end digital and mobile designs, among others. The Keysight U4164A logic analyzer enables measurements of the “increasingly fast digital signals used in emerging technologies,” as Keysight put it, for validation and troubleshooting of designs.

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