The LabVIEW Toolbox

Be Smart, Develop faster!



Presentation

Here comes the LabVIEW Open LSNA. This LabVIEW toolbox enables to use very high level functions on your current instrumentation. The code presents a very high level of abstraction. You just need to define very basic drivers of your instrumentation and then you will be able to use power meters, load-pull systems, vectorial receivers or even several calibrated LSNAs with only ONE polymorphic VI. At the end, you will need 10 minutes for building, calibrating and extracting measurements results, ready to plot in your favorite simulator (MDF file).


Whatever the kind of bench you want to design and then calibrate, all the informations (hardware configuration and software calibration definitions) can be saved and loaded to/from a single file. Those data are then available in a large global variable 'bench.vi'. This global variable consists on several arrays of instruments. Each element (i.e. instrument) includes its own calibration data.
The toolbox comes with a 'click and go' software that let you managing your instrumentation and calibration, save and load your configuration, and open or close the sessions of all instruments available in your setup at once (extremely usefull for PXI devices).

Polymorphic VIs available in the LabVIEW toolbox
The toolbox is a library with an extremely limited content. But those polymorphic VIs are enought to handle any complex setup. You measurement code in LabVIEW will be incredibly reduced.


Then, you can code your automated measurement loops in LabVIEW with just limited number of functionality that already take into account calibrated data and file exporting.

Calibrated measurements from a Power-meter based Load-Pull System and from a 'DIY' Large Signal Network Analyzer
Calibated data acquisition examples in your LabVIEW code thanks to this toolbox.




Example



The toolbox comes with several examples in LabVIEW. One of them is a complete DC Power Supply sweep and S-parameters measurements dedicated to transistor measurements.
Next figure show how simple and versatile is the LabVIEW toolbox. Calibrated data require only one sub-VI per instrument family and finally one block only for the measurements export.

The measurements loops are created with a 'While Loop'. Start and Stop conditions are already taken into account thanks to a sweep manager available to the final user.

Complete code for a DC-sweep and S-paramters measurements in LabVIEW
Calibated data acquisition examples in your LabVIEW code thanks to this toolbox.


Another example on a module to perform power-sweep on a transistor or a power amplifier. The interface is illustrated just below.
On the interface, every instrument or sweep conditions already declared in the global variable 'bench.vi' are pickable thanks to a type-def combo box.
Power-Sweep example provided with the toolbox
Power sweep example on LabVIEW. This program comes with the toolbox with many other examples.


Now, get a look on the complete source-code of this application... Yes! Complete Source-code!!! Feel free to compare it with your last spaghetti plate. The conditions to stop measurements (max DC power, max gain or PAE compression are already defined in a sweep manager, similar to the instrument managers.
Power-Sweep source-code example provided with the toolbox
Source-code of the previous example.... Gluten-free LabVIEW!


Large Signal Network Analyzer is an already defined meta-instrument in the toolbox and, of course includes its own calibration procedure. You can build a LSNA without any downconverter, with mixers or sub-samplers. Everything works !

DIY LSNA hardware created at CU-Boulder
The DIY LSNA hardware created at CU-Boulder includes 4 50 GHz subsamplers from Furaxa. These components are the only one to buy when you already own scopes or RF source. Save your money!




Download and installation

The first beta version of this toolbox (May 2016) is available for free on the Zoya Popovic's web site right here.