News and New Products

Passive scope probes offer bandwidths to 1.5 GHz for high-speed-digital applications

By Dan Strassberg, Contributing Technical Editor -- EDN, 6/3/2009

Agilent Technologies has introduced the N2870A family of miniature passive oscilloscope probes and accessories with bandwidths from dc to 1.5 GHz. The probes’ 2.5-mm-diameter heads cover only one-fourth the surface area of earlier probes’ 5-mm-diameter heads. The devices also offer low input capacitance and a variety of fine-pitch probe-tip accessories. The probes and accessories allow you to probe densely populated IC components and surface-mount devices. The sharp, spring-loaded probe tip helps you keep the probe from slipping off the device under test. Insulating IC caps center the small probe tip on the IC lead and keep it from shorting to adjacent leads. Optional probe-tip accessories provide specialized capabilities for demanding applications.

The probes are available with attenuation ratios of 1-, 10, 20-, and 100-to-1 and probe bandwidths of dc to 35, 200, 350, and 500 MHz and 1.5 GHz. The company’s recently introduced Infiniium 9000 Series oscilloscopes come with one 500-MHz, 10-to-1-attenuation-ratio N2873A passive probe per channel. This probe has an input impedance whose resistive component is 10 MΩ when terminated into the 1-MΩ oscilloscope input. Prices for N2870A-Series probes begin at $220.