InP HBT chipset, enabling high-bandwidth, real-time oscilloscope architecture

A range of real-time oscilloscope with 32 GHz of bandwidth and the lowest reported jitter and noise floor has been developed, providing engineers better signal integrity for characterizing and debugging the fastest interfaces. The oscilloscope incorporates a new architecture for signal acquisition and a new chipset delivering the performance. It features a new analog front-end chipset developed in an InP HBT process, which has a number of features allowing for the implementation of broadband circuits operating at significantly high frequencies. It also features several ICs designed in this process, such a new preamplifier IC reaching frequencies from DC to 32 GHz, a new sampler IC, a new trigger IC, and a new calibration IC. High-frequency sampling is handled by the InP HBT sampling IC in the analog front-end module, while final digitization of the samples is performed in the Agilent CMOS ADC used in earlier oscilloscope designs.