“Fastest” AWG and software meet the needs of wideband digital RF test

The AWG7000B and AWG5000B arbitrary waveform generators (AWG) provide a 20 percent performance boost over many of the prior AWG instruments. They are the world’s “fastest” and most capable family of AWGs designed to meet the test needs for high-speed serial data buses and wideband RF applications. With 9.6GHz effective RF output, 10bit resolution, and sample rates up to 24GS/s, the AWG7000B is the only AWG that can produce high-speed serial waveforms with real-life imperfections including noise, jitter, pre/de-emphasis, and multi-level signaling up to 8Gb/s. Also newly realeased is the radar signal creation option – RDR – for the RFXpress software suite, offering the flexibility in creating pulsed radar waveforms on the AWG7000B and AWG5000B.

HIGH-SPEED SERIAL CHALLENGES

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. AWGs 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.

The SerialXpress software 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 makes intuitive the creation and management of high-speed serial waveforms. The AWG7000B with SerialXpress software is the only one-box high-speed serial data signal generator for receiver stress testing, eliminating the need for multiple instruments and complicated test configurations.

EXPANDING WIDEBAND RF APPLICATIONS

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 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 20GS/s in the previous generation to 24GS/s with the AWG7000B Series, providing engineers with 20 percent 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 12Gb/s 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.