In this episode Shahriar demos the world’s fastest oscilloscope! The Agilent DSA-X 96204Q offers 160GS/s of conversion rate with a bandwidth of 62GHz on two dedicated ‘RealEdge’ channels. It can also provide 80GS/s conversion rate and 33GHz of bandwidth on four simultaneous channels. The unit demoed in this video is equipped with all available options and is valued at over 0.5 million US dollars. The block diagram of various sub-systems of the oscilloscope are presented and the principle operation of the instrument is explained. A 56Gb/s PRBS-15 signal is applied to the scope from a Centellax 2G2P5A (now Agilent N4975A) and the resulting data pattern is examined in real-time. Various scope functions are also presented as well as the capability to observer bit failures at baud-rate using this instrument.

As a second experiment, two 3.125Gb/s PRBS-7 data streams are simultaneously up-convered to 20GHz and 40GHz respectively by using a pair of MITEQ mm-wave DSB tripple balanced mixers and a pair of Avantek 20-40GHz YIG oscillators. The resulting two signals are combined by using a power-combiner and fed to the oscilloscope. The capability of the instrument to act as an ultra-broadband software-defined radio is demonstrated by recovering the two PRBS sequences simultaneously through DSP post processing. The block diagram of this setup can be downloaded from here.

I’d like to thank Mr. Neil Hoffman from Agilent for enabling this demo and Dr. Jeffery Lee for his help with the experiments.