PC-based oscilloscope delivers high-speed performance at half the cost

By Gina Roos, editor-in-chief

Saelig Company, Inc. has added Pico Technology’s PC-based PicoScope 9404-05 5-GHz sampler-extended real-time oscilloscope  (SXRTO) to its line card. The new scope provides real-time and equivalent-time sampling with very high analog bandwidth. The 9404-05 scope also delivers high speed performance at less than half the cost of traditional benchtop solutions, said Saelig.

The PicoScope 9404-05 provides four 5-GHz, 50-Ω input channels, each with its own advanced 12-bit ADC. This provides the timing and display resolution for accurately measuring and visualizing high-speed repetitive analog and data signals. The scope can capture pulse and step transitions to 70 ps, impulses down to 140 ps, and clocks and data eyes to 3 Gbits/s.

Other features include a built-in full-bandwidth trigger for each channel with pre-trigger equivalent-time sampling (ETS) capture that is available above the Nyquist sampling rate and signal acquisitions at up to 2 million triggered captures per second, enabling very fast signals to build up quickly in the display.

The high-resolution software display can be resized to fit any window, and four independent zoom channels can show different views of captured data to a resolution of 1 ps. Most of the controls and status panels can be shown or hidden based on user needs.

Key features include:

• 5-GHz bandwidth, 70-ps transition time
• 1-TS/s (1-ps) equivalent-time sampling
• Four channels with 12-bit 500-MS/s ADCs
• Pulse, eye, and mask testing to 70 ps and 3 Gbits/s
• Up to 2 million triggered captures per second
• Logical, configurable, touch-compatible Windows user interface
• Built-in measurements, zooms, data masks, and histograms

The Pico Technology PicoScope 9404-05 5-GHz oscilloscope is priced at $14,995 from Saelig, the company’s technical distributor in the United States. The scope can be purchased here.