Recently, China Mobile's 6 million TD mobile phone bidding results opened the curtain for China Mobile's 2011 TD terminal development. It is the biggest cake since the commercial use of TD, especially the test instrument industry, which is mainly based on domestic strength, is about to usher in a sweet market period after a difficult start. Inactive" manufacturers join, making the market more competitive. At the same time, the TD test instrument industry is still lacking, and the TD-LTE test has been launched. In order to maintain the upper hand in this field for a long time, domestic manufacturers need to go further.

The large threshold of market space still exists

The role of test instruments in the development of the industrial chain is self-evident. Therefore, when the industrial prospects are optimistic, manufacturers will also target this market. The current situation in the field of TD terminal testing is just like this. According to data, the communication instrument market will show a rapid growth trend in the next three years. The annual growth rate of the global instrument industry market will reach 11%, and the domestic market will reach 13%. Moreover, the industry is a long-term development industry. Continuous evolution, from 3G to 4G research and development and even follow-up technology has been developed, as long as we keep up with the pace, the test instrument industry will develop step by step.

Faced with such a growth space, veteran TD terminal test manufacturers such as Galaxy Bright and Datang Mobile, wait-and-see manufacturers such as Rohde & Schwarz, and emerging manufacturers such as Aeroflex have all begun to exert their efforts.

Aeroflex said that it currently cooperates with Galaxy Highlights in terms of TD test instruments to provide hardware platforms and GSM conformance test systems for its terminal test instruments. In terms of TD-LTE, its 7100 products have already been shipped. , which provides assistance for the research and development of some chip and terminal manufacturers, and is also used in China Mobile Research Institute.

Kong Fei, director of Datang Mobile's instrumentation product line, said in an interview that Datang Mobile relies on the TD protocol conformance test instrument as a breakthrough, and currently has a certain sales scale, and will continue to follow up other product lines in the future. Datang Mobile's instrumentation product line can establish a product system covering R&D, testing, production, certification, etc., and become an organization with strong ability to resist risks. In terms of TD-LTE, the TD-LTE terminal protocol conformance instrument has been released in October, and the IR interface simulation instrument is being developed and debugged, and it is expected to be released by the end of next year.

At the same time, from the perspective of the current TD terminal industry, the quality of the terminal still needs to be improved. From the perspective of testing, there are many reasons for this. First, the terminal manufacturers have not invested too much resources into the testing process. In addition, the testing instruments are expensive. With a wait-and-see position, the quality of the terminal cannot be guaranteed. Therefore, it is necessary to promote the terminal manufacturers to improve their testing capabilities and test conditions as soon as possible. In this regard, the relevant government departments have put forward requirements for terminal manufacturers.

Secondly, the incompleteness of test instruments is also one of the reasons. Looking at the current domestic instrumentation industry, especially in high-end and core instruments, the follow-up of domestic manufacturers is almost vacant, and more is the development of edge instruments. This is caused by the lack of core technologies. Domestic manufacturers are insufficient in terms of technology accumulation and talent pool. In addition, foreign manufacturers have basically divided their fields, so they cannot enter without a suitable entry point.

In order to break through the shortcomings of TD test instruments, under the circumstance that the enthusiasm of foreign manufacturers is not high and the strength of existing domestic manufacturers is still insufficient, a strong manufacturer is urgently needed to intervene and provide stable and high-performance instruments to promote the development of the terminal industry. go ahead. Kong Fei said that Datang Mobile hopes to reflect its own value in the fields that are high-end, can break the technological monopoly, and can reflect the technical value. At present, Datang Mobile has the experience of the TD network side, and also has a strong voice in the 3GPP standard. Therefore, it is Datang Mobile's advantage and responsibility to spread the advantages of the TD market to various industrial chains, including the test instrument industry.

Non-signaling testing is becoming mainstream

Since the commercial trial in 2008, the bottlenecks of the TD terminal link have been broken one by one. In this process, the TD terminal test instrument has contributed a lot. Today, when the TD terminal is put into commercial use on a large scale, the test instrument will still ensure high performance and stability at the factory. However, different from the previous ones, the requirements for TD terminal testing have undergone new changes.

According to relevant test instrument manufacturers, the current demand for TD terminal test instruments from operators' terminal selection, certification agencies and R&D institutions is almost saturated, and this market itself will not be very large, but the TD terminal market is expanding day by day. As well as the promotion of factors such as the improvement of terminal test water by TD terminal manufacturers, the demand for test instruments in the production line will increase greatly. At the same time, after several years of development in the TD terminal industry, the terminal test on the production line side should not be tested in signaling mode, the test instrument does not need to simulate various functions of the base station and the network, and the terminal does not need to complete base station registration, paging and other calls And the call process, only need to carry out the calibration of the radio frequency and the description of the hardware function. Fu Chen, technical manager of Galaxy Highlights, predicts, "By the middle of next year, the testing of the entire production line will enter the non-signaling testing stage."

Fu Chen also said: "After entering the non-signaling test stage, terminal manufacturers or foundries can greatly improve the test efficiency, thereby speeding up the time to market of products, and the insight into the price of test instruments greatly reduces the burden on manufacturers. The test only needs to be used when sampling the product." The GSM era also experienced such an evolutionary stage.

At the same time, indiscriminateness is a major problem of current TD terminal test instruments. Kong Fei said that indiscriminateness is a long-term accumulation process, which requires support from multiple aspects. The first is standard process control, which is required for building process control. The cost and staff are relatively high, and the scale of the current manufacturers is not enough; secondly, a complete supply chain system is required; finally, core technologies are required. At present, many core technologies of instrument manufacturers, including software and hardware, are purchased from abroad, and then two It is difficult to ensure that the products produced in this way will not be affected by a certain bug and cause the instrument to be chaotic.

Link: Datang Mobile Instrument Product Line

Since 2004, Datang Mobile has set up a TD terminal laboratory. In 2006, in order to solve the current situation of the lack of consistency test instruments in the TD terminal industrial chain, Datang Mobile resolutely invested tens of millions of yuan to set up a special instrument development team. It is responsible for improving the research of TD industrial chain instrumentation, and after the preliminary research results are formed, the relevant results are shared with other manufacturers in a basically free way.

Datang Mobile initially established the instrumentation product line, mainly for three reasons: first, from the perspective of profitability, it can enrich the product structure, have more profit points, and improve the company's ability to manage risks; from the perspective of the company's business, enter the instrumentation In the field of instrumentation, it contributes to the company's new business growth point; from the perspective of value, the company has accumulated a lot of technology in TD and wider wireless communication fields. Development in the field of instrumentation.