Test and measurement equipment makter Rohde & Schwarz has unveiled a new oscilloscope series that it says has the world’s fastest real-time update rate and enables engineers to “see more signal detail and infrequent events than with any other oscilloscope.”
The new R&S MXO 4 series has a real-time update rate of over 4.5 million acquisitions per second, the company said, touting the instrument’s support of 16 times the resolution of traditional 8-bit oscilloscopes “at all sample rates without any tradeoffs for more precise measurements” as well as up to 100 times the standard acquisition memory of comparable instruments.
The oscilloscopes come in four-channel models with bandwidths of 200 megahertz, 350 megahertz, 500 megahertz, 1 gigahertz, and 1.5 gigahertz. They have a starting price of 7,600 euros, or a little more than $7,400 at current exchange rates.
Rohde & Schwarz said that the instruments’ ability to see granular signal activity and perform rapid tests is “is unparalleled in the industry” and enabled via a 200 Gbps processing ASIC that is one of several new technologies that the company put to work for the first time in the MXO 4 series.
“The new hardware and software technology blocks and architecture allowed our development team to achieve a once-in-a-decade engineering breakthrough. Our customers will experience a whole new level of performance, and all at a price more affordable than has ever been seen on the market,” said Dr. Andreas Werner, VP of oscilloscopes at Rohde & Schwarz.
In other test news:
–Keysight Technologies, F5 and AMD got together to showcase 5G terabit-scale traffic at this week’s Mobile World Congress Las Vegas. Keysight’s Cyperf cloud-native traffic generator was used to highlight the performance of F5’s cloud-native network function Big-IP Next Edge Firewall, which uses AMD’s third-generation Epyc processors, in AMD’s booth.
“Meeting the data challenges of the 5G era is only one part of the battle. Providing scalable, performant and most importantly, secure solutions is critical to advancing the growth of 5G,” said Nick Hancock, director of telco compute at AMD.
-Optical transport provider Ekinops said that Illinois-based Stratus Networks, which offers wholesale and private fiber networks, is using Ekinops’ 1651 Ethernet access device to support wireless backhaul—in large part, the company said, because the device supports wire-speed service activation testing (SAT) at 10 Gbps and can act as both an SAT generator and reflector. Stratus “now has the tool it needs to not only validate its service level agreements with real-time data, but also to show by how much it exceeded its contracted performance,” Ekinops said.
–MIPI Alliance reported that its summer workshop and plugfest in Munich, Germany, focused on interoperability testing for its MIPI Improved Integrated Interface (I3C), was a success. The workshop brought together 16 implementors of the I3C/I3C Basic specifications for initial-to-advanced interoperability testing of the interface for connecting peripherals to an application processor.
“The MIPI I3C Interop Workshop provided us with an incredible opportunity to not only validate the technical implementation of our I3C Basic protocol analyzer, but also to have a hands-on session with the experts working at the forefront of I3C. Getting their feedback was invaluable to further refine our solution,” said Jonathan Georgino, founder of Binho LLC. “The collaborative spirit among the workshop attendees was inspiring—engineers from industry competitors sitting down together to solve technical challenges will further advance widespread I3C adoption.”
“Interoperability testing early in the design cycle is crucial to reducing time to market and ensuring seamless functionality among multi-vendor devices in deployment,” said Sanjiv Desai, chair of MIPI Alliance. “Events such as the MIPI I3C Interop Workshop are so important because they help companies optimize the manufacturability of their designs, avoid deployment issues and deliver higher-quality products upon which their customers can rely from day one.”
