Source Measure Units (SMUs) are versatile instruments developed at the advent of semiconductors to characterize their complex behavior. Key capabilities of a SMU include 4-quadrant operation, precision measurement and sourcing, and high speed. These capabilities make SMUs similar to a range of other test and measurement equipment, yet different in meaningful ways. This blog explores some of the …
High-power pulsed lasers drive many science and engineering experiments in spectroscopy, metrology, quantum information, atomic physics, and materials research. To perform these experiments reliably and consistently, researchers need to control pulsed lasers with high accuracy, great flexibility, and tight timing. This is where Tektronix arbitrary waveform generators (AWGs) with high sampling …
Tektronix RF Product Manager, Alejandro Buritica, recently penned an article for Microwaves & RF titled Improve the Reliability of 6G Designs with High-Fidelity Test Beds. In it he discusses the early-stage challenges with 6G, including how the lofty expectations are challenging test and measurement engineers, how to analyze signal quality, and how to increase design reliability.
6G will demand …
This article is adapted from a presentation at the March 2021 Meeting of the American Physical Society by Brad Odhner, Technical Marketing Manager, Keithley Instruments, Inc., a Tektronix company.
Quantum Basics
To understand how to create an efficient test & measurement topology for quantum research applications, let’s begin with a 10,000-foot overview of some of the basics of quantum …
A signal generator is an analog or digital device that engineers use to create electronic signals when testing circuit designs. There are many different types of signal generators with diverse features and applications. Below are the most common types of signal generators and the unique capabilities of each.
Waveform or function generators
Waveform generators produce electrical waveforms over a …
Radar signals’ qualities make them inherently difficult to recreate with a signal generator. Their combination of carrier frequency, modulation bandwidth, and in most cases, their pulsed nature creates a series of requirements difficult to match with existing instrumentation. The increasing complexity of radar systems, the growing use of complex modulation techniques such as Barker codes, poly …
When testing complex electronic warfare and wireless communications systems, engineers and researchers need the flexibility to accurately recreate real-world signals. Unfortunately, the real world is messy, and its RF landscape can change rapidly from moment to moment. Thus, engineers often need to cycle through fast-changing signals quickly. With this need in mind, we’ve introduced new Streaming …
Increasingly, designers of radar and electronic warfare (EW) systems and components need to perform modulation and pulse analyses at wider bandwidths. Spectrum managers also need to record and analyze hours of wide bandwidth data. There area number of test and measurement challenges associated with these needs, however.
Here are eight challenges with wideband radar:
Generating …
When I ask my quantum research customers what part of their project they’re most excited about, almost invariably they tell me it’s some unique element of their quantum chip.
But when the experiment is over, and the findings are published, was the chip the most challenging building block of their computer?
Not always.
In fact, after having gone through it all, many teams find that integration …
The quest to dramatically improve computer performance and capabilities centers on quantum computers – a type of computer that exploits some strange properties of physics on the smallest of scales. While much progress has been made in recent years, even moderately small quantum computers are a long way out from delivering consistent and repeatable results.
Developing viable quantum computers is …
