Precision System Technologies
Precision System Technologies (PST) has over three decades of experience in solving problems and helping companies bring new technology from R&D to production. We offer a wide range of services to assist Engineering and Manufacturing, including:
- Development of new test methods to improve process yields and throughput
- Precision automated measurements for R&D and production test
- High-speed, real-time data acquisition and analysis
- RFI and EMI suppression techniques
- High signal integrity pcb design and layout
The Focus is on Improving Performance
PST is a leader in developing new techniques to improve throughput and measurement accuracy, and drive costs down. These breakthroughs give unique benefits that are not available with older technology.
We strive for the simple but elegant solutions that are the most effective. Some examples are shown in the Patents section, and more examples are in Articles.
The most elegant of all is the Binary Sampler.
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Normal Sampler
Binary Sampler |
Binary Sampler: Wideband Waveform Capture
The global appetite for information means data must move at ever-increasing rates. Thermal noise increases with bandwidth and cannot be eliminated. Clock jitter becomes increasingly significant at higher frequencies. This means we are faced with the problem of trying to make accurate measurements on noisy signals.
Conventional wideband sampling technologies use averaging to reduce the noise, which improves the sign-to-noise ratio by the square root of the number of samples. This means doubling the SNR requires four times the number of samples as shown here:
SNR Samples 6 dB = 4 12 dB = 16 18 dB = 64 24 dB = 256 30 dB = 1,024 36 dB = 4,096 42 dB = 16,384 48 dB = 65,536 54 dB = 262,144 60 dB = 1,048,576
This quickly reaches a point where the measurement takes too long, or the system drifts during the measurement. A practical limit may only be 30dB of improvement before the performance starts to degrade. This is called the Averaging Barrier, and it limits the performance of data acquisition systems.
A fundamentally new approach is called Binary Sampling. This breaks through the Averaging Barrier, and it can improve the throughput and precision of waveform acquisition by several orders of magnitude.