The Development Of WLAN Terminal Automatic Test System

As a technical standard, WLAN is undoubtedly technically immature and commercial in experienced such that a large amount of testing to ensure its commercial success is still indispensable. Undoubtedly, Radio Frequency test is one key part of WLAN testing and serves as an important role for the R&D and manufacturing of terminals, as well as access point modules in the whole WLAN industry chain. In order to improve the efficiency of RF test, it is necessary to develop automatic test systems.From WLAN terminal research and development perspective, relevant international and national standards and norms has been referenced in this paper for research on the WLAN RF test method. In conjunction with Virtual Instrument theory and development technology, a WLAN RF automatic test system design is proposed as well as the implementation of the design and the achieving results in the first part. The test results from the automatic system and that of manual testing have been compared and discussion has been made on the advantages and inadequacy of the automatic test system as well as potential enhancements to the system. The design and development of the RF terminals automatic test system is following the methodologies of software development, database systems and test instrument control which allow the interface program control, data storage and instrumentation control to become relatively independent in order to achieve a greater flexibility for the whole system.Referring to the previous system design experience in the past the automatic test system designed in this paper is significantly different. It is designed based on the WLAN terminal R & D and production and more attention is paid to the flexibility of system testing. The testing system adopts a more flexible order to control operations and the system supports all kinds of WLAN standards. There are also more choices for generating test reports to meet the requirement of WLAN R&D and the manufacturer's testing.