Agilent’s major release of its real-time oscilloscopes with 32 GHz true analog bandwidth will undoubtedly attract the attention of Peak-to-Average Power Pat, Dual-band Dave and Radar Rik and entice them to the Agilent booth for a hands-on demo. They won’t be the only ones as this impressively fast scope is destined to attract the attention of designers across the spectrum.
With data rates in the next few years extending beyond 10 Gbps, engineers need oscilloscopes that can deliver higher-bandwidth measurements. Designers of high-speed serial data links, such as USB, SAS, or PCI Express®, will need this level of performance to capture fast, single-shot events and to make critical measurements like jitter while ensuring compliance to industry standards for interoperability. This breakthrough technology gives the new Infiniium 90000-X Series scopes true analog hardware performance to 32 GHz. According to the press release, this scope can measure random jitter at approximately 50 percent of the level reported by competitive products thanks to the what is being reported as the industry’s lowest noise floor (2 mV at 50 mV/div, 32 GHz), lowest oscilloscope jitter measurement floor (~150 femtoseconds); and industry’s deepest memory (2 Gpts).
Pat, Dave and Rik have individual plans to visit the various software companies to address the needs of their fellow designers. The teaser from IMST this week has piqued their curiosity about the company’s EMPIRE XCcel 3D EM field solver with a new multi-PC FDTD algorithm. The new feature can parallelize problems very efficiently on multiple computers, minimizing the latency caused by network traffic and data exchange while keeping the advantages, like memory efficiency and multi-core performance optimization capabilities. The company announced that several large scale application examples, using the new algorithm, will be presented. Apparently, Rik is hoping one of the examples will include a ship-borne radar system.
Peak-to-Average Power Pat, always on the lookout for hardware components that will improve the quality of service for his company’s infrastructure solutions, took notice of the press release from M/A-COM Technology Solutions this week, introducing a family of voltage controlled oscillators (VCO) with low phase noise and low DC current covering 5.7 to 14.2 GHz for the point-to-point radio market. According to the release, the VCOs include a divide-by-two output and are housed in 5x5 mm, RoHS-compliant QFN packages. Depending on frequency, these VCOs provide exceptionally low phase noise performance as low as -117 dBc/Hz at 100 kHz offset and exhibit low performance variation over temperature.
Both Pat and Rik paid particular attention to Delta Electronics Manufacturing’s pre-show announcement that the company has recently implemented a unique and innovative Cable Assembly Designer for the web, making it easier for engineers to specify their cable assembly requirements. Radar systems and infrastructure use a lot of custom cable assemblies. This tool which is featured on the company’s website would allow Pat or Rik’s colleagues to visually build cable assembly drawings, specify markers, testing and other requirements, and send the drawing and specs to Delta via e-mail for quotation. According to the company, an e-mail confirmation including the drawing and specifications as well is sent to the engineer. Of course, both Rik and Pat believe in the value of personal face-to-face relationships with all their vendors, so their trip to the Delta booth will be for that purpose and maybe to haggle over pricing too.