Using silicon-germanium technology, the TDS6604 digital storage oscilloscope offers designers debugging high-speed systems a 6-GHz bandwidth and a 20-Msample/s rate. It will help enable the transition from a wide parallel bus architecture to a narrow, point-to-point serial bus architecture with gigabit data rates in computer and communications applications.
The real-time scope provides its maximum sample rate on up to two channels. In the three- or four-channel mode, maximum sampling is 10 Gsamples/s. Record length is 250 ksamples on one or two channels, and 150 ksamples for three or four channels.
Triggering capabilities support clock recovery at data rates to 2.5 Gbits/s, matching the requirements of OC-48 electrical components, Gigabit Ethernet systems, and Fibre Channel technology. A 32-bit serial pattern trigger (option ST) works at up to 1.25 Gbaud. This meets the needs of USB 2.0.
Also available is mask testing (option SM) for a variety of standards—Ethernet (to 1.25 Gbits/s), Fibre Channel electrical (to 2.125 Gbits/s), InfiniBand (2.5 Gbits/s), USB (12 Mbits/s, 480 Mbits/s), Serial ATA (1.5 Gbits/s), and IEEE 1394b (to 1.5729 Gbits/s). Mask-editing capabilities and other features let users customize mask testing for their specific applications.
The increasing digital system clock rates and bus speeds of these standards are creating analog signal integrity issues. As these system rates increase, the tolerance for analog signal integrity problems decreases, and signal integrity problems are more likely to cause digital errors. To combat this, the TDS6604 can be coupled to a Tektronix TLA series logic analyzer using the Integrated View (iView) package. Users can then see both digital and analog time-correlated waveforms on one display.
The TDS6604 incorporates the Open Windows platform, which provides easy access to industry-standard peripherals, networking elements, and analysis tools. The instrument supports Tektronix's automated measurement packages, such as the TDSJIT2 for jitter measurements and TDSUSB2 for USB 2.0 compliance testing.
The TDS6604 costs $57,500. The SM and ST software options cost from $2495 to $4995. The TDSUSSB2 option is $1995. The scope and software are available for ordering.
Tektronix Inc., www.tektronix.com/tds6604.