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Longer memory, smarter triggers for high-end ’scopes

With its latest series of digital oscilloscopes, Agilent has turned its attention to parameters such as memory depth and triggering. Its new family of instruments is called Infiniium 90000A, and the units come as DSO (digital-storage-oscilloscope) and DSA (digital-signal-analyser) variants. This series includes models with real-time bandwidth of 2.5, 4, 6, 8, 12, and 13 GHz. The memory options are 10, 20, 50, 100, 200, 500 Mpt (million data points)—and 1 Gpt, which Agilent claims as a new industry benchmark. Also new is a hardware/ software triggering system—InfiniiScan Plus—that is capable of “hardware-event identification” of signal features as short as 150 psec, and, with software enhancement, as short as 75 psec.

Sampling rate of these four-channel units is 40G samples/sec, available on channels simultaneously. The deepest memory option of 1 Gpt allows a 25-msec maximum record length—if you use it on a single channel—at the maximum sampling rate, which the company says is several times what is currently available. Conversely, using the 90000A’s ability to take captured data from memory and process it at its fastest rate, you can make 150,000 measurements per second (one every 6.6 µsec) although at the time of publication, precise specifi cations for the available record length, when running at that repetition rate, were not available. There are also trigger modes that will make use of 300,000 triggers per second.

The instruments’ noise fl oor is similar to that of the 80000B series— for example, for the 2.5-GHz model it is 147 µV rms at 5 mV/div setting. Infi niiScan Plus uses, Agilent says, the fastest available hardware- trigger system; the instruments also have a three-level trigger system, combining multiple hardware triggers with the Infi niiScan software, providing “virtually infi nite” trigger combinations—this facility is not available at introduction, but will be added to the range in mid- 2008. Triggering facilities also include— for the fi rst time in a 4-GHz-plus oscillope— standard analogue high-defi nition- TV trigger settings. The range of preconfi gured measurement options comprises 29 applications, including DDR, PCI Express, Display Port, HDMI, Serial ATA, Serial Attached SCSI, Ethernet families, USB, wireless USB, jitter analysis, RFsignal analysis, eye-pattern analysis and protocol-decoding analysis. You can access specifi c application suites via a server- licensing option; other upgrade options include the instruments’ real-time bandwidth and the memory depth.

Agilent Technologies, www.agilent.com.