9.5 GHz optical sampling oscilloscope for $29,495

Alan Tong, Managing Director of market leaders Pico Technology, comments: “The PicoScope 9300 Series are the only compact, full-featured PC-based sampling oscilloscopes on the market. Their specifications and features are a match for traditional full-sized bench-top instruments but at a fraction of the cost.”

All the PicoScope 9300 models are full-featured sampling oscilloscopes with 20 GHz electrical bandwidth, so can be used for pre-compliance tests, fault-finding and margin testing on electrical serial data signals such as 10 Gb Ethernet, SONET/SDH STM64 and FEC1071, 10x Fibre Channel, InfiniBand and PCI Express. The scopes also have LAN and USB interfaces, and advanced large-screen display features such as color and density profiling, multiple trace windows, histograms, multiple measurements and statistics. With an industry-leading sampling rate of 1 MS/s, these scopes can build waveforms and persistence displays faster than other sampling oscilloscopes.

The small footprint of the PicoScope 9300 scopes allows them to be positioned right next to the device or port under test, on the bench or in the field, without additional cables and losses. Specification highlights include: 17.5 ps input rise time, dual 16-bit, 60 dB dynamic range ADCs, 5 ps/div dual timebase, 14 GHz trigger bandwidth, built-in clock recovery up to 11.3 Gb/s, and time interval resolution of 64 fs. Typical input noise is 1.5 mV RMS at full bandwidth, with trigger jitter of 1.8 ps RMS and recovered clock jitter of only 1 ps RMS.

The PicoSample software has been comprehensively updated for the new oscilloscopes. The range of controls has been extended, with intuitive graphics, click-and-drag operations and measurement labels to simplify and speed up operation. The flexible layout shows only the controls and menus you need and maximizes the area available for the data. There is an unrivalled suite of measurement and analysis functions: 61 math operations, 138 automatic measurements and 167 standard comms masks from 1.54 Mb/s to 12.5 Gb/s. PicoSample 3 is compatible with all 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Microsoft Windows from Windows XP to Windows 8.

The PicoScope 9321 Optical Sampling Oscilloscope is available now direct from Pico or its distributors worldwide at only $29,495 / £17,876 / €21,630. All hardware, accessories and software features listed above are included in the price, with no hidden extras. A range of standard SMA pulse shaping filters is also available.