Chipset enables advance in oscilloscope architecture

The Analogue Front-End Chip (named Beta Phoenicis) will allow for front end bandwidth as high as 4GHz, and integrates all functionality required by a digital oscilloscope’s analog modules, including a 1MΩ channel input attenuator for realising fast and really "quiet" sound switch stalls.

Due to the chip using a unique circuit design, it needs only to add a few external components to form an oscilloscope’s analogue front-end channels, greatly improving DSO consistency and reliability.

Other then the analogue front end chip, RIGOL also have the Signal Processing Chip (named Ankaa), which supports 10GSa/s data acquisition capability, and the Probe Amplifier Chip (named Gamma Phoenicis), which will support differential probes up to 6GHz.

The ASICs are based entirely on RIGOL IP and were developed entirely in-house.

“Over the past 19 years RIGOL has proven ourselves to be an innovator in the Basic and Value segments of the Oscilloscope market” says Rico Wang, President of RIGOL Technologies “but with the introduction of this new chip set, developed through years of painstaking research and development, RIGOL will now be able to bring the RIGOL value proposition to more performance oriented applications.”

The Phoenix Chipset enables RIGOL to revolutionise its scope performance with the new UltraVision II architecture.

These enhancements will lead to products with significantly faster waveform capture rates, new filtering and triggering capabilities, and unprecedented memory depths and search capabilities.

When combined with the HW performance of the Phoenix Chipset, Ultravision II will transform the customer value proposition in the 1-4GHz oscilloscope market.

At the chipset launch review in Suzhou China RIGOL demonstrated its prototype scope utilizing Phoenix and Ultravision II.

With 4GHz bandwidth, 20GSa/s real-time sample rate and 1Billion point memory depth it shows that there will soon be a new player in the performance oscilloscope market.