Frost & Sullivan has awarded Boonton Electronics with the 2017 Global Product Leadership Award for its high-performance RF power meters and USB power sensors. Part of the US publicly traded company Wireless Telecom Group, Boonton offers RF power meters and sensors, modulation analyzers, and audio analyzers, and serves primarily the military-aerospace (mil-aero) and medical imaging industries.
RF power meters are general-purpose instruments that find use in aerospace and defense (A&D), communications, industrial, automotive, consumer electronics, and other industries. During its recent analysis of this industry, Frost & Sullivan found that a key trend in the RF power meter market is the move from average to peak power meters, which now generate the majority of the market revenue. As a result, customers are looking for instruments with a wider dynamic range to address new Wi-Fi and long-term evolution (LTE) signals, higher power range and frequencies, and faster rise time.
Customers face challenges with space, time, and costs, particularly in manufacturing and other automated applications, where speed is paramount to increase productivity and throughput. This means end users on those types of industry verticals are seeking smaller, easy-to-use, more affordable test instruments. This accounts for the market demand shift from traditional form factor power meters to the more compact USB sensors.
Boonton provides RF power meters and sensors in both bench-top and USB form factors. Its bench instruments are mainly used in research and development and field applications, primarily by major mil-aero customers, such as the US Navy, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon. Boonton's 4500B RF peak power meter is an excellent example of how the company's bench products are meeting customer needs with 65 MHz of video bandwidth, rise time under 7 ns and a wide variety of interchangeable peak power sensors.
The RTP5000 Real-Time Peak Power Sensor, a USB form factor instrument, provides industry leading capabilities which include the following:
- Up to 195 MHz of video bandwidth
- Rise time under 3 ns
- Wide dynamic range of over 80 dB
In addition to the 4500B, Boonton's bench power meters include the 4540 series, the 4530 series; and the 4240 series, which offers high measurement speed for manufacturing applications. All of these products excel at capturing and measuring fast-pulsed RF signals.
Boonton's USB power sensors include the RTP5000, previously known as the 55 series, and RTP4000. These USB power sensors feature the company's patent pending Real-Time Power Processing technology, which eliminates acquisition gaps and provides zero measurement latency. These sensors provide 100,000 measurements per second. Its USB sensors find extensive use in manufacturing and automatic test equipment (ATE) applications. The company's software can support 8 simultaneous USB power sensors, which is quite attractive for ATE applications.
It is the high performance of its products that keeps Boonton ahead of its competition in the RF power meters market. It has succeeded in communications applications by targeting niche areas where it can differentiate itself through its products' superior measurement speed and throughput. For example, Boonton's RTP4000 power sensor, introduced in September 2016, is a true average power meter that provides 100,000 measurements per second with no acquisition gaps and measurement latency. The RTP4000 also has a frequency range of 4 kHz to 6 GHz. Frost & Sullivan analysis confirms that such low frequencies are not available from other competitors' products.
The 2017 Global Product Leadership Award is presented by Frost & Sullivan, each year, to the company that has developed a product with innovative features and functionality that is gaining rapid market acceptance. The award recognizes the quality of the solution and the customer value enhancements it enables.
Frost & Sullivan Best Practices Awards recognize companies in a variety of regional and global markets for demonstrating outstanding achievement and superior performance in areas such as leadership, technological innovation, customer service, and strategic product development. Industry analysts compare market participants and measure performance through in-depth interviews, analysis, and extensive secondary research to identify best practices in the industry.
