As announced by LeCroy in February 2011, the new high-resolution WaveRunner HRO™ oscilloscopes offers 12 bits of vertical resolution at 400 MHz and 600 MHz bandwidths. The products contains technology that can also be found in SP Devices’ high-speed digitizer products. “Through our collaboration with a design team from SP Devices, LeCroy has become the first oscilloscope supplier to launch a 12-bit oscilloscope into the very important mid-range of the market,” said David Graef, CTO of LeCroy. “With this approach we are able to meet future customer requirements of higher resolution and accuracy while maintaining our industry-leading performance.”

The new models will feature 400 MHz and 600 MHz bandwidths with an unprecedented resolution of 12 bits of vertical resolution. These WaveRunner HROs provide industry-first high-resolution tools for customers requiring high dynamic range and precision measurements and will be available for demonstration and customer shipment in May 2011.

In test and measurement (T&M) systems performance and signal fidelity is key and achieving high performance often require the use of very expensive custom components. By using signal processing technology from SP Devices, performance degrading artifacts originating from the analog domain is compensated for in the digital domain and as a result our customers can stay ahead of competition and achieve state-of-the-art performance based on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components.

SP Devices’ proprietary ADX interleaving IP enables unprecedented sampling rates and high effective bandwidth with no loss of dynamic range while the ADL linearization IP improves the linearity of the analog input path and therefore increase the dynamic range and the total performance of the T&M system. In summary, the use of ADX and ADL IP from SP Devices will provide the performance needed for these advanced T&M systems while allowing for the use of COTS components.

Time-interleaving of analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) is a way to increase the overall system sampling rate by using several ADCs in parallel. The challenge is to handle the mismatch between the individual ADCs, especially at higher frequencies. With its unique self-learning and high-resolution capabilities, SP Device's ADX technology offers previously unseen performance. Corrections are made transparently and in real-time without any need for calibration signals or idle time slots during which to perform calibration. The mismatch correction algorithm supports a resolution of up to 16 bits, with a preserved SFDR of up to 95 dB, depending on the properties of the specific ADC array.

We help our customers to improve competitiveness regardless of where they are positioned in the value chain. The offering from SP Devices covers the complete range from Silicon Manufacturers to System Integrators. SP Device's products are available as Silicon IP, FPGA IP, reference designs, and complete digitizer boards.

The ADX interleaving technology is available as silicon IP for chip manufacturers and semiconductor companies who need to increase ADC sampling speed. ADX is also available as FPGA IP, targeting the market of system suppliers, digitizer companies, and T&M companies.

For customers who do not want to design their own digitizer solution, SP Devices offers both off-the-shelf digitizer solutions as well as customized digitizers.

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Read previous issues online:

Issue #1, 2010 : Ultra High-Speed Digitizers with Xilinx Virtex 6 FPGAs
Issue #2, 2010 : Release of our Latest 14-bit ADC Evaluation Module Which Features 1.6 GS/s
Issue #1, 2011 : PCI Express Interface Added to Our Most Powerful Digitizers