Teledyne LeCroy demonstrated the world’s first 100 GHz real-time oscilloscope on July 24, 2013 at the research facilities of Teledyne Scientific Company in Thousand Oaks, CA. In the demonstration, the prototype scope successfully acquired and displayed live signals at 100 GHz bandwidth. In addition, the Teledyne LeCroy and Teledyne Scientific also unveiled an indium phosphide (InP) chip, which is the first device in a new chip set planned for future generations of high-speed oscilloscopes.

During the demonstration (see video clip below), the injection signal was 100 GHz with a 240 GS/s sample rate (each sample was taken is approximately 4 ps apart). The company’s target applications include CEI-25/28, CEI-56, optical coherent modulation communication systems, defense and radar applications, emerging 10-32 Gb/s serial data technologies, 100GBASE-R Ethernet, SAS12, PCI Express Gen4, Thunderbolt, and next-generation USB.

The demonstration was conducted by Peter J. Pupalaikis, vice president, technology development Teledyne LeCroy; Roger Delbue, vice president, engineering Teledyne LeCroy; and Dr. Amarpal (Paul) Khanna, vice president, components, Phase Matrix, A National Instruments Company.

Clip of Video demonstration:



Notable technology details include the use of LeCroy’s patented digital bandwidth interleaving (DBI) technology; a high frequency microwave front-end developed by Phase Matrix, a National Instruments Company; and three high-speed analog oscilloscope channels. DBI works by splitting the input signal into multiple frequencies which are downconverted to the bandwidth of the digitizing system. Then it acquires and digitizes each band, using DSP to re-assemble them and compensate for distortion.

More information as it is available…

This story originally ran on EDN.