Wavecrest selects Inphi Corporation's GigaTrack THAs

Westlake Village, Calif., 6 September 2006. Inphi Corporation executives have announced that Wavecrest has selected its GigaTrack family of high-frequency track-and-hold amplifiers (THAs) as a building block for its sophisticated family of signal integrity analysis (SIA) solutions, beginning with its SIA-4000.

Wavecrest's test equipment is used to analyze serial data communication and clock signals for a wide variety of applications. The SIA-4000 tests serial data applications with speeds up to 12.5Gb/s, including applications such as PCI Express Gen 2, FB DIMM, 8X Fibre Channel, and OC-192 SONET.

The GigaTrack THAs are specifically targeted at meeting the needs of engineers who are designing next-generation instrumentation, ATE, and military equipment. Engineers can replace numerous components in traditional heterodyne receiver architectures with a THA and a high sample rate ADC. The resulting receivers are lower power and more compact than traditional heterodyne receivers, and provide increased flexibility.

The new GigaTrack family consists of four track-and-hold amplifiers with 2GS/s sample rates. The 49-pin ball-grid-array versions offer 18GHz (small signal) and 15GHz input analog bandwidths with very fast settling times (>60 ps) and low power consumption (1.3W). Plastic QFN versions provide 13GHz analog bandwidth. The GigaTrack track-and-holds operate from a single, -5.2 volt power supply and dissipate only 1.3 watts.

The GigaTrack family supports popular broadband analog-to-digital ADC devices, including National Semiconductor ADC08100/81500, Atmel AT84AS003/008, ADI 9480, Maxim/Dallas MAX104/108, and others.