Tektronix Accelerates Arbitrary Waveform Generators

(Product News, 13 Aug 2008)

Tektronix Inc. has launched the new AWG7000B and AWG5000B Series of Arbitrary Waveform Generators (AWG), which provide a 20 percent performance boost over many of the prior AWG instruments and continues to be the world's fastest and most capable family of AWG's, designed to meet the test needs for high-speed serial data buses and wideband RF applications. Both equipment also feature the radar signal creation option, RDR, for the RFXpress Software suite, offering the ultimate flexibility in creating Pulsed radar waveforms.

With 9.6GHz effective RF output, 10 bit resolution, and sample rates up to 24GSps, the AWG7000B can produce high-speed serial waveforms with real life imperfections including noise, jitter, pre/de-emphasis and multi-level signaling up to 8Gbps.

Tektronix also recently announced the launch of SerialXpress software that performs direct synthesis of waveforms for high-speed serial data receiver testing, making it ideal for testing SATA, SAS, PCI-Express, HDMI, DisplayPort and other serial bus technologies operating at speeds up to 8Gbps. SerialXpress manages the creation of these waveforms for high-speed transmission on the AWG7000B Series. An easy to use interface provided by the SerialXpress software package makes intuitive the creation and management of high-speed serial waveforms.

In the RF world, technologies ranging from a wireless mouse to a satellite imaging require test equipment that can provide enough sample rate and resolution to re-create even the most complex RF behavior. The latest digital RF technologies often exceed the capabilities of current test equipment to generate the wide bandwidth and fast changing signals that are increasingly seen in many wireless applications such as UWB-WiMedia, radar, and others. The new AWG B platform supports wideband RF applications with carrier frequencies up to 9.6GHz.

RFXpress is a powerful and easy-to-use software package that is used to create and edit RF/IF/IQ signals that are generated by AWGs. RFXpress fully exploits the wideband signal generation capabilities of AWGs to considerably reduce the time needed for signal creation and simulation, and reducing overall development and test time. The AWG7000B supports direct generation of signals in all UWB-WiMedia bandgroups (BG1-BG6) when used with RFXpress and WiMedia options.

The new RDR option for RFXpress provides the ability to build a radar pulse suite starting from a pulse, to pulse trains, to pulse groups. It supports applications such as resolving range and doppler ambiguity, frequency hopping for Electronic Counter Counter Measures (ECCM) and Pulse to Pulse Amplitude variation to simulate Swerling target models.

UWB-WiMedia signal creation for all the bandgroups of the UWB spectrum is possible with the updated RFXpress option UWBCF/UWBCT. The UWB-WiMedia conformance mode enables generation of all signals that conform to standard specifications, while the custom mode enables adjustment of the signals for stress and margin testing.

AWG7000B's maximum sample rate has been increased to 24GSps, providing engineers with 20 percent improvement, more than four times the performance compared to any other AWG. The AWG7000B is able to generate signals including imperfections such as noise and jitter up to 12Gbps with 35ps rise time (20/80) for high-speed serial data applications and modulated digital RF/IF signals up to 9.6GHz for wideband applications including advanced radar.

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