Agilent Launches First Equipment from Acqiris Product Line

( 1 Sep 2007 )

By Stephen Las Marias, Editor


Agilent Technologies SA recently released its 8-bit High-Speed PCI Acqiris DP1400 Digitizer—its first new product from the Acqiris product line—that is capable of handling real-time sampling rates up to 2GS/s and features a simultaneous multibuffer acquisition and readout (SAR) mode that significantly improves measurement throughput. The compact, dual-channel, 8-bit digitizer, designed in a standard short PCI card format, features a highly integrated technology for extremely low power consumption of only 15W, and has an on-board clock chip that provides timebase stability of ±2ppm.

In an interview by Wireless Design and Development Asia, Richard Soden, Product Manager, and Greg Tate, Asia-Pacific Business Manager, Acqiris Operations, Agilent Technologies, tell more about their company's new product release, as well as share their insights on the wireless test equipment market. Excerpts:

What else can you say about the advantages of this new digitizer as compared to other similar products in the market?
Richard Soden: We often see 2GS/s digitizers with 250MHz or 200MHz analog bandwidth—that's great if you are looking at signals with a hundred megahertz bandwidth. Otherwise, 500MHz, you will not get a solution from those other products. The ability to increase or obtain an equivalent six channel system which is much synchronized across multiple units is something that you won't see anywhere else.

Greg Tate: The clocks in these cards are extremely accurate. We developed a special silicon-germanium technology so that we can have a monolithic clock and trigger system. Inside this particular digitizer, you've got a clock that provides better than 2ppm in stability and in terms of jitter characteristics it's typically less than 2psec. It means that the ADC is clocked with maximum precision, enabling us to make very good timing measurements. The clock is very accurate and very precise, and it means that the digitizer can make very good timing measurements over long periods of time. Of course when you convert that information into the frequency domain, it also means you can extract very good frequency information.

RS: Yes, our clock has 2ppm accuracy; our competitive products, we see often 25ppm. So we are already talking about an order of magnitude better in terms of stability. The stability and the jitter of the clock have direct impact on the noise in the system as well. We often talk about noise thinking it is the background. But if you have jitter and inaccuracies, that could bring out a whole new lot of noise, which, in particular applications, will be disastrous.

In wireless and communications testing, one way to keep pace with the advances is through software. Can you give us your comments regarding software designed testing and dedicated testing?
RS: Software is the backbone for any testing, and so is the backbone of any digitizer. It's very important for Acqiris that we get the customer up and testing as quickly as possible. This is why we provide them with this basic software code to allow them to do their acquisitions very quickly. The great thing with using digitizers within this synthetic instrumentation, and particularly the Acqiris digitizers themselves, is that they have a single driver. For higher performance operations, all the customers will need to do is take out the old hardware component, introduce the new hardware component, and make minor modifications in the software. For example we introduced a 4GS/s digitizer, they can actually swap out their 3GS/s, swap in the 4GS/s, make some minor modification such as increasing the sample rate within their software, and they are up and running straight away. This gives them flexibility in terms of software and hardware future upgrades, for their future testing needs.

GT: In the past, the approach was to design a specific monolithic instrument to do a particular application. What we are seeing now is much greater flexibility where we can use one card or piece of hardware, and by adopting different software modules you can make that hardware perform different types of tests.

How do you see the test equipment market perform in the next several years?
GT: Today, what we find is that we have different target markets. Each of the markets that we are serving has different requirements; and so often we find they are driven to different from factors, depending on what those requirements are. The approach that we adopted always is to look at the demands by the market that we try to save, and then we package our products to match those requirements. That's why we have PXI and PCI, compact PCI, and VME-type modules. As for applications, we find the compact PCI platform is widely accepted, particularly in the commercial and industrial area. Customers want to be able to build up small, relatively low-cost test systems using commercial parts or tools. The PC provides that kind of platform, and the PCI interface enables them to build up these, for the synthetic instrument-type systems, at a relatively economical cost.

Can you tell us some key projections about the overall wireless test industry?
GT: A little bit like the Olympic slogan, something in the lines of 'higher, faster, stronger.' That's the trend. When it comes to testing, people want to test with more accuracy and they want the test to be done in a faster way. And that is constantly driving the market. There is no question in the communications business, we are moving from the analog world into the digital world, and the frequencies that are being used are constantly moving upwards, so that puts more and more demand on the hardware test systems.


You can reach Stephen Las Marias at stephen.lasmarias@rbi-asia.com.