I'm a graduate student working on a project where we generate pulses with instantaneous bandwidths ranging up to 20 GHz. We want to be able to measure the pulses and save the data to a computer. Obviously, real-time sampling (40 GS/s + oversampling) won't do. I think it's a good problem for equivalent time sampling. We would use an FPGA to control a lower-speed ADC over many patterns of the waveform.
We can control the triggering of our pulse generators, so we know when each pulse will occur. Some rough numbers we would try to achieve:
- 10 ns total window time
- At least 40 GS/s - the higher the better
- Jitter RMS < 10 ps
I understand that the typical architecture would include a delay line, a low-speed ADC, an external clock, and an FPGA. Does anyone have any recommendations for hardware that could achieve this, or experience with similar projects to share with me? (This is not our expertise)
(I know that you can buy equivalent time scopes - we want to transition to an FPGA-based receiver because it would allow control over signals to other parts of our system)
-Sam
