Tektronix Accelerates Arbitrary Waveform Generators

“Engineers have told us that they need greater performance, capability, and versatility from a signal source to keep pace with the latest technology,” said Mike Higashi, vice president, Signal Sources Product Line, Tektronix. “Tektronix designed the AWG B series to minimize complexity for users and to provide the performance needed to match increasing high-speed serial data rates and the advance of wideband digital RF technologies. The AWG B series can create, replicate or generate virtually any signal and also has the ability to generate up to six signals simultaneously on the AWG7000B Series. No other AWG can match the performance, capability and flexibility of the Tektronix AWG B series. ”

Design engineers who are developing new technologies such as SATA Gen 3, PCI Express 2.0, PCI Express 3.0, HDMI 1.3, DisplayPort and the latest storage devices need to process large amounts of data at faster speeds, broader bandwidths and higher frequencies. AWG’s are used by engineers in design and test processes to create, replicate and generate either ideal, distorted or “real-life” signals including noise, jitter, glitches and other imperfections to assist with prototype, debug, verification, and standards compliance for the latest serial data designs.

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 8 Gbps. 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. The AWG7000B with SerialXpress software is the world’s only one-box high-speed serial data signal generator for receiver stress testing, eliminating the need for multiple instruments and complicated test configurations.

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 9.6 GHz.

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 arbitrary waveform generators (AWGs). RFXpress fully exploits the wideband signal generation capabilities of Arbitrary Waveform Generators (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 offers the ultimate flexibility in creating pulsed radar waveforms. Option RDR 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.

The maximum sample rate has increased from 20 GS/s in the previous generation to 24 GS/s with the AWG7000B Series providing engineers with 20% improvement, more than 4x the performance compared to any other AWG. The AWG7000B is able to generate signals including imperfections such as noise and jitter up to 12 Gb/s with 35 ps rise time (20/80) for high-speed serial data applications and modulated digital RF/IF signals up to 9.6 GHz for wideband applications including advanced radar.