According to Rigol Technologies, its Phoenix oscilloscope chipset will allow the needs of higher performance applications to be addressed by future instruments.
The Phoenix chipset has three elements, each named after stars in the Phoenix constellation. The analogue front end chip, called Beta Phoenicis, supports bandwidths of up to 4GHz and integrates the functionality required by a digital oscilloscope’s analogue modules. It features a 1MΩ channel input attenuator for what Rigol calls ‘fast and really quiet’ sound switch stalls. Only a few external components are required to create analogue front-end channels, improving DSO consistency and reliability.
A signal processing chip, called named Ankaa, supports the acquisition of data at rates of up to 10Gsample/s, while the probe amplifier chip, called Gamma Phoenicis, supports differential probes with bandwidths of up to 6GHz.
“Over the past 19 years, Rigol has proven itself to be an innovator in the basic and value segments of the oscilloscope market,” said Rigol’s president Rico Wang. “With the introduction of this new chip set, developed through years of painstaking research and development, Rigol will be able to bring its value proposition to more performance oriented applications.”
Amongst the benefits predicted for devices featuring the chipset are significantly faster waveform capture rates, new filtering and triggering capabilities and ‘unprecedented’ memory depths and search capabilities.
A prototype oscilloscope, featuring the Phoenix chipest and the UltraVision II architecture, has been demonstrated, with a 4GHz bandwidth, a real-time sample rate of 20Gsample/s and 1billion point memory.
Author
Graham Pitcher
Source: www.newelectronics.co.uk