Basic Signal Generator Applications

Signal generators fall into three basic categories: verification, characterization, and stress/margin testing. 

1. Testing Digital Modular Transmitters and Receivers
2. Testing D/A and A/D Converters
3. Stressing Communication Receivers

Wireless equipment designers developing new transmitter and receiver hardware must simulate baseband  I&Q signals to verify conformance with emerging and proprietary wireless standards. Some high-performance arbitrary waveform generators can provide the needed low-distortion, high-resolution signals at rates up to 1 gigabit per second (1 Gbps), with two independent  channels, one for the “I” phase and one for the “Q” phase. Sometimes the actual RF signal is needed to test a receiver. Here, arbitrary waveform generators with sample rates up to 200 S/s can be used to  directly synthesize the RF signal.

Newly-developed digital-to-analog converters (DAC) and analog-to-digital converters (ADC) must be exhaustively tested to determine their limits of linearity, monotonicity, and distortion. A state-of-the-art AWG can generate simultaneous, in-phase analog and digital signals to drive such devices at speeds up to 1 Gbps.

Engineers working with serial data stream architectures (commonly used in digital communications buses and disk drive amplifiers) need to stress their devices with impairments, particularly jitter and timing violations. Advanced signal generators save the engineer untold hours of calculation by providing efficient built-in jitter editing and generation tools. These instruments can shift critical signal edges as little as 200 fs (0.2 ps).