VNA Multiplexing

Customer

A leading aerospace company (systems integrator and manufacturer of military aircraft and defense electronics)

Application

Customer needed to replace an existing dual VXI 90 channel RF multiplexer switching system used for testing PCB backplanes. The multiplexers were used to multiplex a VNA to characterize different paths on a PCB backplane. Not only was the VXI platform large it is also expensive the LXI solution recommended only requires 5U of rack space.

Solution

A modular LXI solution was proposed which gave the customer the flexibility to change the size of the multiplexers by just adding or removing a module from the chassis. An evaluation unit comprised of a 60-102-001 7 slot LXI chassis with a 40-875-001 16x1 mux was provided to back up technical discussions and it proved to be ideal for the application.

For the application the customer is using one 60-103-001 18 slot LXI chassis with 16 40-875-001 16x1 mux modules and one 40-874-002 dual 8x1 mux allowing for two 128x1 multiplexers for connection to each port of the VNA (as shown in image below).