Tektronix Inc. recently unveiled the 7 Series DPO oscilloscope with a bandwidth up to 25 GHz. Called the first in a new generation of ultra-high-performance instruments, the scope features the company’s latest signal path and data processing advancements, including two new proprietary custom ASICs, along with optimized FPGAs, and a high-performance GPU, designed to reduce noise, maintain signal integrity, and accelerate analysis.
The new generation of scopes uses Tektronix’s new chipsets—the Tek079 10-bit analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and the Tek085 low-noise preamplifier—to deliver low noise, high effective number of bits (ENOB), and an upgradeable architecture.
The 7 Series DPO oscilloscope claims the industry’s lowest noise and highest leading ENOB. The ultra-low random noise delivers 7.5 bits at 8 GHz to 6.5 bits at 25 GHz, providing precision across the full bandwidth range. Available bandwidths include 8 GHz, 10 GHz, 13 GHz, 16 GHz, 20 GHz, and 25 GHz. Other key specifications include a sample rate of up to 125 GS/s and record length of up to 2 Gpoints.
The oscilloscope also features up to 10× faster data transfer (compared with the Tektronix DPO70000 oscilloscopes) with 10G SFP+ LAN and the recently launched TekHSI high-speed interface that accelerates high-throughput validation. Target applications include engineers and researchers in high-speed communications, high-energy physics, AI, and quantum computing segments.
Tektronix is looking to do things a little bit differently in the performance space because the market requirements are shifting, driven by AI data centers, advanced research, and quantum computing, which is also new to the test environment and wideband RF applications, said Mark Briscoe, senior product marketing manager at Tektronix.
The test space has traditionally been driven by bandwidth, sample rate, and record length, but they’re not the things that drive sales these days, Briscoe said. Everybody can build a 25-GHz scope, which this one is, and everybody has enough sample rate to manage any application and deep records—the ability to capture long timespans, he added.
Briscoe said today’s customers are driven by what they are building, as well as the technology in PCI Express, Ethernet, and proprietary buses such as NVLink from Nvidia. “These are different animals, and the amount of bandwidth that is required on their end to move data in data centers, for example, is pretty incredible.”
7 Series DPO oscilloscope (Source: Tektronix Inc.)
New features in the ultra-high-performance oscilloscope
With this scope, Tektronix focused on performance improvements in three key areas: noise, jitter, and data transfer speed. Focusing on what customers need the most to get their jobs done starts with performance, Briscoe said.
Tektronix focused very heavily on reducing the instrument’s noise as much as possible, and that starts early in the design process with the definition of the custom ASICs used in the instrument, Briscoe said.
It also called for a lot of new design around the signal path to keep all the noise out, which included leveraging innovations from some mainstream products in how they route clocks differentially to protect from electromagnetic interference. Built-in signal path compensation delivers optimized measurement accuracy by adjusting internal gain, offset, and frequency response for precise signal capture and high ENOB.
Briscoe estimates that the Tektronix team started working on the custom ASICs about five years ago, followed by work on the new oscilloscope about three years ago.
Tek085 preamplifier (Source: Tektronix Inc.)
One of the custom ASICs is the Tek085 preamplifier. “The preamp is responsible primarily for amplifying or reducing the voltage level,” Briscoe said. “Sometimes we have to reduce it to protect the front end because of the very sensitive electronics in there, but most of the time. we have to amplify it for people who are dealing with really lossy channels.”
The preamp also sets the volts-per-division setting on the instrument via two ways: a 1× pass-through setting and a 5× attenuator.
The new scope series also leverages the company’s QuietChannel technology that applies active equalization to compensate for high-speed signal loss, reducing noise and increasing measurement fidelity.
QuietChannel technology implements continuous time linear equalization in the hardware instead of the software in the preamp, which further reduces the noise profile, resulting in less jitter in the time domain, Briscoe said.
“We’re actually boosting the customer signal in a certain frequency band, usually at a high frequency because that is where the loss is the highest,” he added. “That allows us to reduce the noise profile even more than we’ve ever been able to do before.”
Briscoe calls it “transformational” for customers to see a very clean signal, which adds margin to their testing needs.
QuietChannel is available in several versions that target different center frequencies and amounts of loss. There is also an auto-set function to select the optimal setting for the input signal to compensate for the high-frequency signal channel loss.
Tek079 10-bit ADC (Source: Tektronix)
This scope also uses a new 10-bit ADC, the Tek079, upgrading its prior products from 8 bits. “So the combination of the preamp, the signal path, and the A-to-D converter is really what gets us the performance boost in this space,” Briscoe said. “It leads to ultra-low noise—the lowest-noise product we’ve ever built.”
It also translates into a higher ENOB. “When you start with the 10-bit A-to-D converter, you don’t actually get 10 bits of vertical resolution,” Briscoe said. “Traditionally, in our 70000 Series products, you might get 5.5 bits at certain frequencies, such as 25 GHz, and that is driven by noise, distortion, and other irregularities in the signal path. We’re looking at 6.5 effective bits in this product, so we’re gaining back one full bit.”
This enables more accurate measurement of the voltage, he said. “That affects our customers in all three segments, but the ones most interested in ENOB are in the advanced research marketplaces. They want the best performance possible, and a tenth of a bit is a big deal to these guys, so going a full bit better is a reason to buy a new scope.”
Jitter is also a driving specification, and that mostly has to do with the quality of the oscilloscope’s time base, Briscoe said. “We’ve done everything to try and reduce jitter down to a point that gets below some of the requirements of these newer technologies.”
The other performance aspect of the DPO oscilloscope isn’t on speeds and feeds but how the data is moved, because these datasets are getting so large, Briscoe said. The 7 Series uses PCI Express Gen 3 × four lanes in this box and adds a 10-Gigabit Ethernet port, which is an SFP+ reconfigurable Ethernet port on the back of the instrument, he said.
In addition, Tektronix recently launched TekHSI, a high-speed interface, which the 7 Series leverages. It’s a set of libraries that customers can use through Python or other environments to be able to interact and pull data off the instrument at wire speed, close to 10 Gbits/s, which is a 10× improvement over what is currently available in the market, Briscoe said.
A platform approach
The 7 Series is equipped with TekScope software for cross-platform consistency and is compatible with TekConnect probes. It also features a 15.6-inch 1080p touchscreen and supports both Windows and Linux.
A big part of the 7 Series development was ensuring that it was easy for users to transition to the new series. This includes using the same user interface (UI) and probe interfaces.
“We want to make it fun to use but also make it more efficient at the same time,” Briscoe said. “We’re able to bring the same user interface that is on our 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 Series up into the 7 Series class of product. It really streamlines their workflow.”
The interface is very data-centric, putting their data first, Briscoe said. For example, if a user wants to change a trigger setting, they just tap the trigger badge and it opens the menu and they tap out to dismiss it, improving their workflow, he added.
In addition, the 7 Series uses the same probe interface as the prior generation, so users can use the same probes as well as any adapters that plug into the front end. “This saves them a significant amount of money to move to the new platform,” Briscoe said.
Continuity is so important for the customer, providing a consistent workflow, said Chris White, director of product management at Tektronix. The look in the field where the menus and measurements are—all those things are familiar to customers, he said.
White cited a customer example where they were able to get up and running on the new scope within five minutes, running their own automation code, which was previously used on the 6 Series. “These are incredibly complicated instruments with a million different capabilities, and the ability to get up and running on a brand new platform in a few minutes is incredible.”
So it’s not just the look and feel of the UI, White said; preserving the code that engineers spend tons of time developing is a massive efficiency boost and time saver for customers.
“The care for the user experience is a deep-rooted part of the launch to ensure we’re bringing forward a comprehensive platform across the portfolio,” White said.
However, the instrument is housed in a bigger box, measuring 326.4 × 560 (handle to handle) × 620 mm, due to the additional electronics needed to deliver the higher performance, but Briscoe said it is designed to be “very quiet acoustically” so it can fit into their environment.
The DPO714AX oscilloscope is the first in Tektronix’s ultra-high-performance 7 Series. It can be ordered now and begins shipping later this month.
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