An oscilloscope that breaks the 100-GHz barrier

The LabMaster 10-100Zi oscilloscope is the first commercially available instrument that lets engineers see and capture 100-GHz signals in real time. As such it opens the door for development of the next generation of high-speed communications systems, from basic research to the communication backbone to consumer devices.

With a basic price tag of $900,000, the unit can record 240 Gsamples/s into an acquisition memory of up to 1,536 Mpoints. One of these scopes was recently used by Alcatel-Lucent to demonstrate the highest-bandwidth coherent optical receiver, which can detect a 160-Gbaud QPSK signal. Dr. Peter Winzer of Bell Labs, the industrial research arm of Alcatel-Lucent, said that, “We are excited to see that Teledyne LeCroy has pushed oscilloscope technology to where the oscilloscope's bandwidth is no longer the limiting factor in our research; it currently exceeds the bandwidth of the transmitter and optical-to-electrical converter in the receiver.”