Low Cost 12 GHz Sampling Oscilloscope

Verification and testing of high speed digital designs requires a lot of expensive test equipment.  To design with 5.0 Gbps technologies such as PCI-E 2.0, a design team would need to have access to a 20 GHz TDR with advanced S-parameter software packages, and some type of oscilloscope for measuring the jitter and eye diagrams of the signals.  In addition, other equipment such as a Synthesys Research BERTScope could also be very useful in proving the robustness of the system and in tracking down root cause for certain signal quality issues and bugs.  Even renting all of this equipment is cost prohibitive for many design teams, and buying it is very hard to justify unless you have many projects to use the equipment each year.  I recently came across a low cost 12 GHz sampling oscilloscope from Pico Technology.  The PicoScope 9000 series has a couple of different models with different levels of functionality.  Neither of these models really has nearly all the features that you might want for signal integrity measurements yet, but the availability of these devices does provide hope that lower cost test equipment may be a possibility in the future for multi-gigabit serial interfaces.  The cost of the devices is approximately $10k to $12k.  One way these devices save cost is that they are meant to be used with an external PC that does all of the data processing and display.  The device consists of an analog front end to capture and store signals, and a digital interface to get the data into a PC.  Most high end oscilloscope equipment from the major manufacturers such as Tektronix, Agilent, and Lecroy basically contains a built in PC inside the oscilloscope box.  Everything is integrated into the box and the scopes even running PC operating systems such as Windows or Linux.  The major disadvantage of this system approach to oscilloscopes is that the PC hardware inside them becomes outdated very quickly, much more quickly than the analog oscilloscope hardware outlives its useful life.  It seems to make much more sense to partition the system at the oscilloscope to PC interface

Pico Technology also has a lot of other test such as other oscilloscopes that use external PCs (lower bandwidth real time scopes), and data loggers.  I have also seen similar type of equipment from other manufacturers for logic analyzers.