News - Board and System Test

Agilent enhances Wideband Digital Receiver/Digitizer

06 December 2013 – Agilent announced three new options and extended functionality for its M9703A AXIe eight-channel wideband digital receiver/digitizer. These new offerings address the growing need for better, faster measurements in the communications and aerospace/defense industries. The multi-module processing synchronization and optimized analog performance of the M9703A provide industry-best measurement accuracy for wide analysis bandwidth on up to 40 phase-coherent channels.

The instrument’s deeper onboard memory allows extended signal acquisition.

Many multichannel applications such as radar, advanced MIMO or baseband-IQ (BBIQ), require excellent signal sensitivity and phase coherency across eight channels or more. Phase-coherent acquisition across multiple digitizers and optimized dynamic range is therefore required. Traditional test platforms are generally limited to a lower number of parallel phase-coherent channels, and the connection to the analysis software layer can be slow.

The Agilent M9703A wideband digital receiver/digitizer provides superior value in multichannel applications that need simultaneous wide-bandwidth and high dynamic-range measurements, such as radar emulation, test and calibration, or research and design validation in advanced MIMO and baseband-IQ applications.

The new M9703A-FRF option delivers industry-best dynamic range and sensitivity over the full input frequency range for improved analog performance, with optimized analog-to-digital conversion. This option offers improvements of 0.3 effective bits, 2 dB signal-to-noise ratio, and 4 dB spurious-free dynamic range.

The M9703A-LDC option enables fast and flexible measurements, with real-time digital downconversion (DDC) on the data for up to 80 MHz analysis bandwidth (160 MHz in I+jQ mode) with center frequencies from DC up to 2 GHz. The wide input frequency range, combined with a very low noise power spectral density (down to -145 dBm/Hz, which is comparable to a 16-bit digitizer), make the M9703A a step toward a fully digital receiver. In addition, the M9703A-LDC provides an accelerated connection to the software measurement layer, such as Agilent’s 89600 Vector Signal Analysis software.

The M9703A-M16 option provides 16 GB of onboard memory, corresponding to 1 Gsample per second per channel, for applications requiring a long acquisition time.

 “RF communications and aerospace/defense applications are moving toward a fully digital architecture,” said Mario Narduzzi, modular solutions marketing manager for Agilent. “This requires the continuous analysis of an increasingly wide variety of signals, while ensuring the best measurement fidelity. To address these demands, the M9703A provides flexible and accurate measurements over a large number of phase-coherent channels for modern multichannel applications.”

The M9703A AXIe wideband digital receiver/digitizer, combined with an Agilent five-slot AXIe chassis, can reach up to 40 phase-coherent channels in only 4U of rack-mount space. This enables users to simultaneously acquire data on a large number of channels under dynamic conditions, reducing test and calibration time by days and even weeks.

www.agilent.com/

• Prev
• Next