Keysight claims breakthrough in 100+ GHz

Keysight Technologies has announced what it says is a breakthrough for building the world’s highest-bandwidth oscilloscopes, with the successful turn-on of chipsets that take advantage of its indium phosphide (InP) technology.

The new chipsets will enable the company to deliver real-time and equivalent-time oscilloscopes in 2017 that offer bandwidths greater than 100 GHz, and with significantly better noise floors than others currently on the market.

Engineers working with next-generation, high-speed interfaces, such as the upcoming IEEE P802.3bs 400G, as well as terabit coherent optical modulation, will need oscilloscopes for electrical parametric measurements.

These technologies and others will play a key role in validating fifth-generation wireless (5G) designs, and will drive the need for high-performance, real-time and equivalent-time signal analysis capabilities to 100 GHz and beyond.

As data rates continue to extend beyond 56 Gbps NRZ and 56 Gbaud multilevel signalling, engineers will need not only higher bandwidth, but also higher vertical resolution and lower noise floors to address their validation challenges.

Keysight says its new chipsets have been designed with these challenges in mind. Its investment in the next-generation InP process has enabled it to scale transistor switching frequencies beyond the 300 GHz level.

“Our goal is to move multiple performance parameters ahead simultaneously,” said Dave Cipriani, vice president and general manager of Keysight’s oscilloscope business.