Ericsson Cellular Network at TÜV Rheinland Test Center

At the end of March, I went to the TÜV Rheinland Test Center. TÜV stands for Technischer Überwachungsverein, which is Technical Inspection Association in English. There are three big ones. TÜV Nord, TÜV Rheinland, and TÜV SÜD along with a few smaller independent ones: TÜV Thüringen, TÜV Saarland, and TÜV Austria. These days they do a lot of work with automotive, but they were originally created to inspect steam boilers for trains before cars had even been invented. I even have a post about that. See The Mercedes Benz Museum and the Invention of the Automobile. Cadence has done automotive and semiconductor test work with TÜV SÜD. For some details, see my posts:

• What Is Automotive Tool Confidence Level 1?
• Modus DFT Has Been ISO 26262 Certified by TÜV-SÜD
• What to Do About IP Developed Before ISO 26262? (this one is actually with SGS TÜV Saar)

With all that German it sounds like I had to get on a plane to Europe, but TÜV Rheinland has an outpost in Fremont so I just had to drive there. TÜV and Ericsson have just announced what they call a "sandbox" to allow customers to test and certify mobile phones, connected cars, IoT devices, and more.

The day's presentations were led off by Bob Mitchell who is the EMC and Environmental Services Segment Manager for TÜV Rheinland in the Americas. Talking to him at lunch, he turned out to have been a designer at Analog Devices and so was very familiar with Cadence, especially Virtuoso.

The facility is a huge anechoic room (in the electrical/radio sense, not the acoustic sense). There was an SUV in the room, but most of the room was taken up with chairs for the people invited. There would be plenty of room for several cars. The SUV was actually on a turntable so that it can be rotated to check that connections work in all directions. The room contained a 5G basestation, and a 4G LTE basestation. When the doors to the facility are closed, no radio signals from outside penetrate the room, so only the equipment in the room can connect. I can confirm that I got zero bars with the doors closed.

The obvious big suspects have their own facilities like this, but for smaller companies, this is the only facility available. Without a facility like this, there are two ways to test devices: simulation, and trying it on the actual network. The problem with simulation is that often devices work in the simulator but not in the real world, which is noisy and has unpredictable latency and other hard-to-model aspects. And the problem with the real network is that you can really only test pretty normal behavior. You can't take a basestation down and see how your phone handles it. It's the real network, and real customers will get annoyed. This sandbox falls between the two. It is a real network with real Ericsson hardware, and it is isolated from the real world so you can see if your devices work with an arc-welder in the vicinity. You can crash the basestation. You can take a frequency band out of service.

What are the things that you might do there? Let's start with one very non-obvious one. Will your connected car work in China? Ericsson can load up the basestation software they run in China, with the frequency bands used there, and you can verify that without having to drive to China. The most obvious one is just to check if your device works, and this is especially important early in network rollout when there is no real network to even test the basic stuff against. You can measure parameters like upload and download speed. You can check whether technologies interfere (5G and WiFi, for example).

The sandbox is equipped with much more diagnostic capabilities than a real basestation, so anomalies can be analyzed more easily. Somewhat confusingly for me, and probably you, EDA doesn't stand for Electronic Design Automation, it stands for Ericsson Diagnostic Analysis. If there is not enough power in the unit that runs the sandbox, it has access to the cloud and to lots of data analysis at Ericsson sites.

5G basestation. The two white units at the top are antennas, at the bottom is the basestation. A decade ago that would fill a room. The fins look like some advanced antenna but are actually a lot of cooling fins and it was very warm to the touch. This is just low-band 5G, not millimeter-wave.

4G LTE basestation

Connected car (on a turntable)

The "network." This is the system that runs the whole sandbox and does all the stuff a cellular network does, controls the basestations, runs the backhaul, connects calls, and so on.

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