Cable Performance Evaluator “CaPE”

Cable Performance Evaluator “CaPE”

We have developed a device that can evaluate the performance and aging of flexible cables used for millimeter-wave measurement in collaboration with Anritsu Corporation, an electronic measuring instrument manufacturer.

Product Overview

At the age of 5G, there are more and more situations where millimeter waves of several tens of GHz are handled in equipment development.

In the development of high-frequency devices, many of you may have experience of the reception level, error rate, or frequency characteristics being changed even if the cable is moved slightly when the measuring device or antenna is connected with a cable when measuring a product’s performance.

This is because some measuring instruments and wideband antennas do not always have proper impedance matching in the measurement frequency band. As a result, multiple reflections occur between devices connected to both ends of the cable, causing standing waves to be generated inside the cable. Therefore, for example, in a cable whose internal phase constant changes significantly when bent slightly, the positions of the nodes and antinodes of the standing wave move, resulting in level fluctuations.

Until now, most of the performance evaluations of flexible cables have been done by connecting them to impedance-matched measuring instruments. So no evaluation has been done that takes into account the standing waves generated in actual measurements. Therefore, we have developed a device that can evaluate standing waves generated in a cable and commercialized it as an option for vector network analyzer (VNA).

Figure 1: Appearance of the Cable Performance Evaluator “CaPE-K” (40 GHz type, 2.92 mm connector) (In combination with Anritsu’s VNA “MS46122B”)
Figure 2: Measurement Example of the Cable Quality	Figure 3: Measurement Example of the Cable Deterioration

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