Asynchronous electro-optic sampling of all-electronically generated ultrashort voltage pulses

Abstract

We measure the output of an electrical pulse generator with a repetition rate of 76 MHz employing a laser-based asynchronous sampling technique with an effective sampling frequency of 250 GHz. A best estimate of the resulting 13 ns long waveform is obtained from multiple waveform measurements, which are taken without any trigger event and subsequently aligned in time. This asynchronous sampling scheme can even be adopted in situations where small phase drifts between the electrical pulse generator and the laser occur, making synchronized sampling very difficult. In addition to accurate measurements, the proposed asynchronous measurement scheme allows for the construction of covariance matrices with full rank since a large number of time traces is acquired. Such matrices might reveal correlations which do not appear in low-rank matrices. We believe that the asynchronous sampling technique advocated in this paper will prove to be a valuable characterization tool covering an ultra-broadband frequency range from below 100 MHz to above 100 GHz.

Metrology in electricity and magnetism: EURAMET activities today and tomorrow

“…Design and production of electronic high-speed systems often require the exact measurements of continuous wave and pulsed high-frequency signals in the time domain. The PTB development of a laser-based vector network analyzer [92] and new asynchronous sampling techniques with femtosecond lasers [93], developed in cooperation with National Instruments Belgium (NIB), constitute major advances in this field. Using high-speed instrumentation for measurements over long time windows often yields time traces with more than 10 4 data points.…”

Announcing the 2015Measurement Science and Technologyoutstanding paper awards

“…The selected paper [1] derives a laser-based asynchronous optical sampling (ASOPS) technique to measure the output waveform of a next-generation electrical pulse generator. The experimental results demonstrate that an accurate waveform reconstruction of a 13 ns voltage pulse can be constructed through the collection of a large number of measurements, combined with software processing of the data.…”