Agilent Technologies has pushed real-time oscilloscope bandwidths up to 32GHz for the first time.
The test firm has used indium phosphide semiconductor technology with a 200GHz transition frequency for the first time in the front-end signal amplifier and sampling circuits.
As a result, the Infiniium 90000-X series oscilloscopes have a bandwidth range of 16 to 32GHz, without the use of DSP bandwidth boosting, which is commonly used in high-end scopes.
“This means for us there will be no DSP boosting in our high-end scopes in the future,” said Peter Kasenbacher, Agilent’s European scope product line manager.
The result is a scope which will measure 13.5ps pulse rise times with a noise floor of just 2mV at 50mV/div and the full 32GHz bandwidth. Jitter accuracy is 180fs.
“Noise floor is the key parameter for high speed signal measurement accuracy,” said Kasenbacher.
This is important for measuring signals, such as 10G Ethernet and SAS 12G, to the fifth harmonic.
While the headline bandwidth is impressive, the importance of the 90000-X series for Agilent is that it will bring it head-to-head with its main competitors in the 16GHz scope market. Its previous top-end scope was the 90000A series at 13GHz.
“Initially, 16GHz is the target market and we can offer an upgrade capability to 32GHz, no one else can,” said Kasenbacher.
The range starts at £88,000 for the 16GHz scope and stops at £180,000 for the 32GHz model.
The full range will have 10 models with bandwidth options on two-channel scopes of 16, 20, 25, 28 and 32GHz. There are 40 and 80Gsample/s sampling rate options and the maximum memory depth is 2G points.
Scopes with this speed capability require sophisticated probe set-ups and Agilent has a 30GHz probe which uses the same InP front-end amplifier circuits.
The price tag for the probe alone is £20,000. For the first time each probe will be fully s-parameter calibrated so the engineer can factor these into the measurements.
See: Agilent is planning major PC-based test move