Pico 9404-16 - 16 GHz Sampler-Extended Real-Time Oscilloscope

• 16 GHz bandwidth, 22 ps transition time
• 5 TS/s (0.2 ps resolution) equivalent-time sampling
• 8 Gb/s clock recovery (optional)
• SXRTO (sampler-extended real-time oscilloscope)

16 GHz Sampler Extended Real Time Oscilloscopes

The PicoScope 9400 Series is a new class of SXRTO oscilloscopes that combine the benefits of real-time sampling, equivalent-time sampling and high analog bandwidth.

The PicoScope 9404 has four high-bandwidth 50 Ω input channels with market-leading ADC, timing and display resolutions for accurately measuring and visualizing high-speed analog and data signals. It is ideal for capturing pulse and step transitions to 70 ps, impulse down to 140 ps, clocks and data eyes to 3 Gb/s. Most high-bandwidth applications involve repetitive signals or clock-related data streams that can be readily analyzed by equivalent-time sampling (ETS).

The PicoScope 9400 Series SXRTOs have four input channels up to 16 GHz with market-leading ADC, timing and display resolutions for accurately measuring and visualizing high-speed analog and data signals. They are ideal for capturing pulse and step transitions down to 22 ps, impulses down to 45 ps and clocks and data eyes to 8 Gb/s. Most high-bandwidth applications involve repetitive signals or clock-related data streams that can be readily analyzed by equivalent-time sampling (ETS).

The SXRTO quickly builds ETS, persistence displays and statistics. It has a built-in full-bandwidth trigger on every channel, with pretrigger ETS capture to well above the Nyquist sampling rate. There are three acquisition modes—real time, ETS and roll—all capturing at 12-bit resolution into a shared memory of 250 kS.

PicoSample 4 software is derived from our existing PicoSample 3 and PicoScope 9000 products, which together represent over ten years of development, customer feedback and optimization.

The high-resolution display can be resized to fit any window, filling 4k and even larger monitors or arrays of monitors. Four independent zoom channels can show you different views of your data down to a resolution of 0.4 ps. Most of the controls and status panels can be shown or hidden according to your application, allowing you to make optimal use of the display area.

The oscilloscope has a 2.5 GHz direct trigger that can be driven from any input channel, and a built-in prescaler can extend the trigger bandwidth to 5 GHz. The external prescaler on the 9404-16 extends this further to 16 GHz.

These compact units are small enough to place on your workbench close to the device under test. Now, instead of using remote probe heads attached to a large benchtop unit, all you need is a short, low-loss coaxial cable. Everything else you need is built into the oscilloscope, with no expensive hardware or software add-ons to worry about, and we don’t charge you for new software features and updates.

Typical applications

• Telecom and radar test, service and manufacturing
• Optical fiber, transceiver and laser testing (optical to electrical conversion not included)
• RF, microwave and gigabit digital system measurements
• Signal, eye, pulse and impulse characterization
• Precision timing and phase analysis
• Digital system design and characterization

High-bandwidth probes

The PicoConnect 900 Series low-impedance, high-bandwidth probes are ideal companions for the PicoScope 9400 Series, allowing cost-effective fingertip browsing of fast signals. Two series are available:

• RF, microwave and pulse probes for broadband signals up to 5 GHz (10 Gb/s)
• Gigabit probes for data streams such as USB 2, HDMI 1, Ethernet, PCIe and SATA

Bandwidth limit filters

A selectable analog bandwidth limiter (100 or 450 MHz) on each input channel can be used to reject high frequencies and associated noise. The narrow setting can be used as an anti-alias filter.

Frequency counter

A dedicated frequency counter shows signal frequency (or period) at all times, regardless of measurement and timebase settings, with a resolution of 1 ppm
 

Optional clock and data recovery

Clock and data recovery (CDR) is now available as a factory-fitted optional trigger feature for the PicoScope 9404-16 and 9404-05 SXRTOs.

Associated with high-speed serial data applications, clock and data recovery will already be familiar to PicoScope 9300 users. While low-speed serial data can often be accompanied by a separate clock signal, at high speed this approach would create timing skew and jitter between the clock and the data that could prevent accurate data decoding. Thus high-speed data receivers will generate a new clock, and using a phase-locked loop technique they will lock and align that new clock to the incoming data stream. This is the recovered clock, which can then be used to decode and thus recover data accurately. They have also saved the cost of an entire clock signal path by now needing only the serial data signal.

The sampler-extended real-time oscilloscope (SXRTO)

The PicoScope 9404-16 maximum effective sampling rate in ETS is 5 TS/s, with a timing resolution of 0.2 ps, which is 10 000 times higher than the scope’s actual sampling rate.

With an analog bandwidth of up to 16 GHz, the PicoScope 9404-16 SXRTO would require a sampling rate exceeeding 32 GS/s to meet Nyquist’s criterion and somewhat more than this (perhaps 80 GS/s) to reveal wave and pulse shapes.

Using ETS, the 9404-16 gives us 312 sample points in a single cycle at the scope’s rated bandwidth or a generous 110 samples between 10% and 90% of its fastest transition time.