High-performance scopes provide 20-times boost in waveform-update rates
By Dan Strassberg, Contributing Technical Editor -- EDN, January 15, 2010
Agilent Technologies recently announced the inclusion of faster PC hardware in its Infiniium 90000 Series oscilloscope family. With waveform-update rates more than 20 times those of many comparable scopes, these real-time instruments are the most responsive in their class, says the manufacturer. If you design high-speed serial data links, such as USB (Universal Serial Bus), SATA (serial advanced-technology attachment) or PCIe (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), you rely on high-performance oscilloscopes to measure jitter and other signal parameters. Complex analysis is often critical but can be time-consuming. For example, using 20 million points of memory, competitive scopes can take more than 30 sec to run a jitter-separation algorithm. With their new performance enhancements, the Infiniium 90000 Series units yield results in less than 2 sec. This performance, combined with the scopes’ optional industry-leading 1 billion points of memory, enables developers to quickly document their design performance across a wider range of test conditions.
Oscilloscopes also require processing power to remain responsive when manipulating complex algorithms, such those for de-embedding the effects of stray and other circuit elements, such as probes and fixtures, which you cannot physically remove from the unit under test. The new scopes’ improved responsiveness allows them to account for these effects without noticeably slowing the display of acquired waveforms. For example, the company’s N5465A InfiniiSim waveform-transformation software takes advantage of the hardware acceleration to enable faster waveform updates in measurements that use de-embedding.
The performance enhancements are now standard at no additional cost on all Infiniium 90000 Series scopes. The 90000 Series includes two lines, DSO (digital storage oscilloscope) and DSA (digital-signal analyzer), each of which comprises six models that offer bandwidths of 2.5, 4, 6, 8, 12, and 13 GHz. Of these, the 8-, 12-, and 13-GHz models acquire a maximum of 40G samples/sec, and the 2.5-, 4-, and 6-GHz models acquire a maximum of 20G samples/sec. Base US prices for the DSO line range from $37,344 to $109,201; those for the DSA line range from $45,518 to $122,287. In addition to the features of DSO models with 20M samples of memory, DSA models add EZjit+ jitter-analysis software, serial-data-analysis software, and noise-reduction capabilities.
