Innovation Drives Growth for Agilent

In the highly competitive oscilloscope market, Agilent Technologies continues to lead the overall market share and post the highest growth rates compared with the whole industry. Beginning with the first fully digital 1GHz oscilloscope developed in 1984, the company now has released a 32GHz true analog bandwidth oscilloscope and a 30GHz upgradable bandwidth probing system—both firsts in the industry. According to Jay Alexander, Vice President and General Manager, Oscilloscope Business, Agilent Technologies, innovation is the key to continue to have an edge in this market.

“We’re innovating in several areas. First is in IC processes. We have a captive fabrication facility that produces various types of compound semiconductors, for example GaAs and InP. These processes are optimized for test and measurement applications—giving us an edge compared to having to source our custom ASICs from merchant processes. Next is in advanced packaging. We have multi-chip module capabilities in our technology center, which are not available anywhere else in the world. We can package collections of ASICs and passive components on custom substrates and achieve levels of signal integrity, noise immunity, and thermal management that are not achievable with other means. A third major area of innovation is in probing – the ability to access the signals of interest when they are not available via standard connections and cables. Agilent invests in both design and fabrication innovation in this area in order to make new contributions, such as the 30GHz browser probes that were introduced this past April,” explains Alexander during the Agilent Measurement Forum 2010 here in Singapore.

Speaking of IC processes, Agilent’s recently released Infiniium 90000 X-Series utilized six new ASICs—Preamp, Sampling Demux, Probe Amplifier, ADC Buffer Amplifier, Trigger, and Calibration Generator—developed under the company’s 200GHz InP technology. According to Alexander, InP allows Agilent to achieve both high speeds and high voltage on the critical circuits making up the analog signal path. “This means we need fewer gain stages in the amplifiers, meaning we can implement the circuits with fewer transistors. And fewer transistors result in a simpler and more precise design that is more easily simulated and then executed in the advanced process, resulting in very low noise and jitter and very high bandwidth. This is the hallmark of the contribution made by the X-Series products,” he adds.

The oscilloscope industry, of course, has its own share of technology challenges that makers continue to face. Alexander mentions the probing system design as one of the key issues in this area. “Probing design is challenging because with a probe, the mechanical design becomes the electrical design—which is to say that the physical geometries wind up determining the electrical circuit and therefore the electrical performance. Not to mention the usability and reliability of the probe. To do probing design well requires engineers with great electrical, mechanical, and customer insight,” he explains.

Another challenge, according to Alexander, is keeping up with all the application-specific measurement needs that are out there. This is being addressed by Agilent by pioneering a capability called User Defined Application—a system where customers can define their own collection of application measurements and fit them into Agilent’s standard application framework, such that the entire operation functions seamlessly within the oscilloscope.

“One of the things that make the oscilloscope business so interesting is that the products depend on continuing innovation in both hardware and software. You need the hardware to make the raw measurement possible, but you need software to calibrate and correct the hardware, as well as to deliver the analysis and user-interface capabilities in a way that meets or ideally exceeds customer expectations. I think you will see examples of both of these broad disciplines driving oscilloscope development in the future. For example, you’re going to see faster hardware bandwidth, but the only question is how fast and when. And you’ll also see even more advanced measurement and analysis algorithms, for example for complex de-embedding algorithms, and more capable user interfaces to help manage the ever-expanding set of functionality that is present in modern oscilloscopes,” explains Alexander.

In terms of the most interesting test markets so far this year, Alexander mentions the “3’s” of high-speed serial signalling—USB 3.0, PCI-Express Gen 3, and SATA-3. “These are high-performance standards involved in the consumer, computer, and storage markets, among others, and that in one way or another are helping to support and enable the ongoing high demand for data traffic in computing and communication devices around the world,” explains Alexander.

Agilent Technologies
www.agilent.com