test&measurementZONE Products for the week of February 12, 2007

Agilent Technologies Says . . .
DSA8000B: Digital Signal Analyzer Optimized for Serial-Data-Based Designs

Agilent Technologies Inc. announced an oscilloscope measurement system with specialized tools for designing, debugging and validating designs that include high-data-rate serial buses. The new Agilent DSA80000B digital signal analyzer (DSA) system offers the industry's lowest noise floor, jitter-measurement floor and trigger jitter, and the flattest frequency response, making it possible for engineers to gather more accurate data about the low-voltage differential signals in their designs. The DSA80000B DSA is ideal for engineers working in the communications, data storage, computer, aerospace/defense and consumer electronics industries.

Agilent's DSA80000B DSA is built around an Infiniium DSO80000B Series oscilloscope and the InfiniiMax probing system, which provide critical capabilities for achieving accurate and repeatable measurements. The oscilloscope and probe capabilities are augmented with high-speed serial data analysis and EZJIT Plus jitter-analysis software to give designers additional capabilities for designing, debugging and validating their serial-data-based designs.

EN-Genius Says...

The ultra-wideband DSA80000A family of digital signal analyzers is based on Agilent's Infiniium family of real-time oscilloscopes, with seven versions from 2 GHz to 13 GHz for 2-channel bandwidth at 40 Gsample/s, and 2 GHz to 8 GHz for 4-channel bandwidth at 20 Gsample/s. A 20 Gsample/s monolithic ADC is behind each of the four channels.

With the option fitted, memory is 2 Mpoints with 1 and 2 channel operation and 1 Mpoint for 3 and 4 channel use. The timebase range offered is 5 ps/division to 20 s/division real-time with a really low timebase jitter of less than 1 ps rms (and a bandwidth of 7.5 GHz).

The noise floor is staggeringly low. With the vertical sensitivity set to 5 mV/div (the lowest hardware setting, which can be reduced to 1 mV/div with software) typical noise in the 2 GHz bandwidth model is only 131 µV rms, and only 419 µV rms in the 13 GHz bandwidth model. At 100 mV per division the range is from 1.0 mV rms to 3.3 mV rms. (The sensitivity range goes up to 1 V per division.)

Interface connections available are USB 2.0 (1 connector on the front, 4 on the rear), GPIB, PS/2, 10/100Base-T and RS-232. The instrument can be driven by an external 10 MHz reference clock, or it can be used itself as a reference source. For memory storage a 40 Gbyte hard drive is provided, as is a CD-R drive, and USB Flash memories can also be used.The smarts are provided by a 2.93 GHz Intel Celeron microprocessor running Windows XP Pro with 1 Gbyte of system RAM. The display is a 1024 x 768 touch-screen color LCD with a 21.3 cm diagonal. Single-ended probes are available up to 4 GHZ while differential probes are available for the complete range of instrument bandwidths.

The units offer symbol search and trigger features with a real-time eye display and masks are provided for Gigabit Ethernet, SATA, SAS, PCI Express, XAUI and Fibre Channel. A measurement set-up wizard takes you through the steps for serial data measurements and the displays are intuitive. Compliance test software is available for most of the world's serial standards with, no doubt, more to come. The same is true of test fixtures.

These are oscilloscopes optimized for today's digital signals, often 8b/10b encoded and usually with embedded clocks where noise and jitter issues (instrument and probe) simply make standard oscilloscopes incapable of reliably, and repeatedly, confirming results -- particularly in compliance areas. The clock recovery and 8b/10b decode allow for straightforward random and deterministic jitter analysis. The noise and jitter performances are superb and although the instruments are by no means low-cost the speed of compliance measurements, and repeatability, will pay for themselves over a relatively short period of time. Agilent also offers an upgrade program where the bandwidth of your purchased instrument can be increased.

The DSA80000B family is in production with a starting price of $37,000.

Data Sheet