Test specialist LeCroy has taken advantage of IBM's 8HP SiGe process to create an oscilloscope which, it believes, offers twice the performance of the nearest competitive product with the same number of channels.
UK and France sales manager Jean Laury said: "The base model in the family is the four channel LabMaster 10Zi, which has a 36GHz bandwidth and samples at 80Gsample/s." However, performance can be upgraded through the use of LeCroy's Digital Bandwidth Interleave (BBI) technology and through ChannelSync. DBI increases bandwidth to 60GHz and the sampling rate to 160Gsample/s, while ChannelSync allows up to 20 base LabMaster 10Zi scopes to be linked. In this way, a system can be created which offers 20 channels of 36GHz or 10 channels at 60GHz.
IBM's 8HP SiGe process doubles the performance of the previous generation, offering transistor switching speeds of up to 200GHz. It also features lower electrical noise, a factor said to translate into a 3 to 4dB improvement in baseline noise. According to LeCroy, this equates to a noise performance at 36GHz that is 'roughly equivalent' to that available in LeCroy's 20GHz scopes.
DBI allows bandwidth to be increased by splitting the signal into multiple paths of lower bandwidth, acquiring the lower bandwidth signals and then reassembling them using dsp technology. Laury said: "It's a simple concept. We take a 60GHz signal and split it into 0 to 30GHz and 31 to 60GHz. Signals pass through the same amps and the same a/d converters and are then put together to get 60GHz. While we use many fpgas in the device, we use a dsp for controlling the bandwidth because dsp rules need to be applied."
Each LabMaster 10Zi features an 8HP based front end and track and hold device per channel, as well as twin interleaved 40Gsample/s a/d converters. Each channel is supported with a 512Mpt memory. "Acquisition memory is also processing memory," Laury pointed out, "so we could do an FFT on the 512Mpts; it's important to be able to process the whole memory."
Applications for the LabMaster 10Zi include 28Gbit/s serdes development, multilane serial communications and optical coherent modulation systems.
However, high performance comes with an equally high price tag: LeCroy says a four channel 36GHx 10Zi will cost $283,000. The scope will also be available in 25 and 30GHz variants.
