Agilent Technologies Inc has announced the expansion of its award-winning Infiniium 90000 X-Series oscilloscope family to include the world’s highest performance mixed-signal oscilloscope, or MSO. The expansion adds six new MSO models, as well as 13-GHz DSO and DSA models, to the X-Series.

Engineers and developers use MSOs to accelerate testing by employing the additional trigger flexibility for debugging and validating their devices.

The tightly integrated digital channels of the new MSO models can function at 20GSa/s in an eight-channel configuration, 60% faster than other high-performance MSOs, or at 10 GSa/s in a 16-channel configuration. Agilent now offers MSOs ranging from 70MHz to 33GHz of analogue bandwidth.

The new 13-GHz DSO, DSA and MSO models give engineers access to the industry’s lowest noise and jitter measurement floors of the Infiniium 90000 X-Series at an unprecedented low price.

“As system speeds have increased, it has become clear that additional digital channels, with performance appropriate to the analogue scope bandwidth, would mark the next breakthrough in insight for our customers,” says Agilent’s Oscilloscope products division vice president and general manager Jay Alexander.

“Pairing the world’s fastest MSO with up to 33GHz of true analog bandwidth allows engineers to accurately debug and validate emerging technologies such as DDR4-3200.”

With the Agilent Infiniium 90000 X-Series, current and future customers who purchase DSO or DSA model oscilloscopes can upgrade to MSO functionality. Most high-speed MSOs available today come with fixed configurations that cannot be upgraded. Agilent’s N2834A upgrades let users add MSO capability at any time. This capability, along with Agilent’s existing bandwidth and memory upgrades, makes the X-Series one of the most flexible and expandable platforms on the market.

Unlike other MSOs, Agilent Infiniium 90000 X-Series MSOs have up to 400 million points of data capture behind each digital channel. To accommodate sample-rate differences between the high-speed analogue channels and the digital MSO channels, this memory depth can be automatically sized with the analogue trace length, including the full 2-Gpts memory available on Agilent oscilloscopes. This memory depth allows for fully time-correlated capture of elusive events that span a long time record.

Very fast memory channels, such as DDR3, often have complex signal qualification conditions that can elude even the most adept engineer. Agilent has added a special DDR triggering mode to the new MSOs to perform read/write separation and eye alignment for these complex conditions.

Protocol errors plague even the most mature system designs. While some modern scopes have the ability to move up the protocol stack on the analogue channels, an engineer trying to understand root cause can quickly use up the scope’s analogue channels. Adding an MSO makes up to 16 high-speed digital channels available for the measurement. Protocol checking on the digital channels for a measurement like DDR makes it possible to see the full view of analogue impacts while validating protocol compliance.

The MSO uses the same 90-pin connector found on Agilent’s logic analysers. This allows access to a broad range of probing accessories including:

17-channel differential/single-ended soft touch connectorless probes
17-channel differential/single-ended flying lead set
17-channel differential/single-ended Samtec connector
Selected DDR interposer probing technologies