In this episode Shahriar does an extensive review and teardown of the Keysight (Agilent) MSO-S Series 10-bit 20GS/s Oscilloscope. This scope supports bandwidths up to 8GHz and 400M points of memory per channel. With hardware 10-bit ADCs as well as an ultra low-noise front-end, this scope offers an impressive dynamic range on all four channels. All scope features are software upgradable.
The teardown consists of a close look at the acquisition board and the system blocks diagram. Various elements such as the ADC structure, FPGAs, memory and the time-base are all examines. The scope offers a +/-12ppb time-base with a 100fs jitter noise floor. Some basic performance measurements are also presented such as noise and SFDR.
The wireless experiment shows the performance of the scope in demodulating very low-power signals on an RF carrier. A -75dBm 2.5GHs QPSK signal can be demodulated by the scope. The instrument can also demodulate a 16QAM signal in presence of an interfering signal which is 44dB higher in signal power. All demodulation experiments are performed using the Keysight VSA.
The backplane experiments demonstrate the scope’s capability to perform jitter and noise analysis on multi-gigabit serial links. The built-in equalization software suites are used to find the FFE coefficients and those coefficients are used to perform hardware equalization in an FPGA communication link.
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