LeCroy pushes oscilloscope bandwidth to 45GHz

The devices take advantage of second generation silicon germanium components to support their performance. Alongside increased bandwidth, these chips are said to provide a 25% boost in signal to noise performance. Models in the range also make use of sixth generation Digital Bandwidth Interleave (DBI) technology to extend bandwidth without the adverse effects of bandwidth 'boosting'. According to LeCroy, the 8 Zi-A Series has been designed as a single hardware platform, with nine models spanning bandwidths from 4 to 45GHz. Also featured is a model with 20GHz of analogue bandwidth on four channels, said to provide the highest performance and signal fidelity available on four measurement channels. On all models, acquisition capability can be doubled with the use of an oscilloscope synchronisation kit, with all acquired channels displayed on one display grid. The standard sample rate is 120Gsample/s for 45GHz bandwidth, 80Gsample/s for 25 to 30GHz bandwidths, and 40Gsample/s on all four channels at 20GHz. Meanwhile, for 4 to 20GHz models, the standard sample rate is 40Gsample/s on all four channels, with an option to increase the sampling rate to 80Gsample/s on two channels. All memory is available at full record lengths for analysis processing, with 20Mpt/channel provided as standard. Memory can be expanded to 256Mpt/channel and, when used in 120 and 80Gsample/s mode, memory can be interleaved to create 768 and 512Mpt/channel. A 3GHz Intel Core 2 Quad processor is featured, along with 8Gbyte of ram and the 64bit Windows 7 OS.