Panasonic Corporation has revealed that it has built one of Japan’s largest anechoic chambers in Yokohama to evaluate the communication performance of an entire CAV with 5G equipment.
Radio equipment and antennas for 5G communication, which achieves broadband communication by using multiple antennas, may not provide their actual or discrete performance when they are incorporated into vehicles owing to the reflection of radio waves on the body and electromagnetic noise from other electronic devices.
In Panasonic’s anechoic chamber, the communication performance of a whole vehicle can be efficiently evaluated. The chamber also contributes to determining the optimum positioning of 5G radio equipment and antennas that satisfy both the vehicle design concept and communication performance in the early stage of CAV development.
The anechoic chamber features efficient omnidirectional evaluation, evaluation of MIMO antenna communication performance, and evaluation of beamforming performance. While rotating the turntable on which a vehicle is placed through a full 360°, the system can conduct omnidirectional evaluation by moving the simulated base station tower along an arc and changing the distance between the tower and the vehicle. The system can simultaneously evaluate data at up to 200 frequencies and achieves high measurement efficiency.
Furthermore, Panasonic’s antenna engineers analyze measured data from each antenna and provide communication performance evaluation results of complicated MIMO antennas and beamforming.