Highest-performing AWGs

has introduced two additional models to its N6030A series arbitrary waveform generator (AWG) family, the highest-performing wideband AWGs in the industry.

The N6032A, a dual-channel AWG designed for radar and military communications, delivers 625MS/s and 15 bits of vertical resolution per channel to create wideband waveforms up to 250MHz wide. The N6033A, designed for satellite communications and general-purpose wideband applications, delivers 625MS/s and 10 bits of vertical resolution per channel, making it the lowest-cost dual-channel AWG for wideband applications.

"We now have four different AWGs with various bandwidths and fidelity ranges to meet the varying needs of our aerospace and defence and emerging-communications customers,” said Ron Nersesian, vice president of Agilent's wireless business unit. “The new software options speed time-to-market by allowing users to create the most realistic waveforms for evaluating their next-generation designs."

Three new software options build upon the N6030A series' ability to create realistic wideband signal simulations.

Agilent's direct digital synthesis software (Option 330) enables radar and emerging-communications engineers to create basic waveforms in the AWG's memory and then modify their behaviour with profiles for amplitude modulation, phase modulation and frequency modulation.

This enables engineers to simulate testing without the time and expense of field trials, such as in-flight and in-orbit testing. This option can also be used to simulate fading profiles in receiver testing for satellite and 4G signals, such as multiple input, multiple output formats (MIMO).

Agilent's dynamic sequencing software (Option 300) enables radar and military communications engineers to build custom signal scenarios on the fly. Engineers can dynamically access up to 16k of previously stored sequences through a 16-bit interface and replay these complex waveforms to respond to changing threat environments, or to create signals where the next waveform to be played is not known in advance.

Finally, Agilent's additive white Gaussian noise software (Option 250) allows receiver designers to perform front-end receiver testing without expensive external noise signal sources. Controlled amounts of wideband noise pedestals (500 MHz wide) can be added to test waveforms to better understand receiver sensitivity such as Eb/No -- ratio of the signal's energy per bit (Eb) to the spectrum noise density (No) -- versus bit-error rate.

Because both the reference waveform and noise pedestal are generated inside the AWG, designers avoid measurement drift and errors normally associated with manually combining the two signals externally.