Case Study: Molex achieves rapid, accurate virtual 5G vehicular antenna design with Keysight SystemVue

Virtual environment for modeling and simulation guides configuration choices before chamber and road tests

Molex Connected Mobility Solutions (Molex) needed to move beyond a single “shark fin” antenna to distributed, concealed 5G antennas placed around a vehicle while managing spacing, exotic materials (glass, carbon fiber), and the need to combine electromagnetic, RF, and baseband domains in one predictive environment. To avoid costly full-vehicle anechoic and road testing, Molex worked with Keysight tools—notably Keysight SystemVue and the Keysight 89600 Vector Signal Analyzer—alongside HFSS and Simulink integrations to create a virtual antenna design workflow.

Using Keysight SystemVue and the Keysight 89600 VSA as the backbone of its Vehicle Digital Antenna System (VDAS), Molex imported HFSS patterns, Simulink baseband blocks, and third‑party RF component models to run end‑to‑end simulations. Keysight-enabled VDAS completes a 360° analysis (180 samples at 2°) in about 8 hours on a multi‑core server, showed a distributed 4x4 MIMO configuration outperforms a 2‑antenna shark fin (especially in rural scenarios), revealed optimal compression/decompression limits, and produced measurable throughput, BER, and EVM insights—allowing Molex to dramatically reduce hardware testing time and cost.

Molex

Ryan Price

Director of Strategic Marketing for Transportation Innovative Solutions