Any Transmission Rate, Any Modulation Format

The PSO-200’s flexible design makes it a future-proof tool to characterize—without distortion—any optical signal. Its effective bandwidth is broad enough to support constellation and eye-diagram analysis of signals at rates beyond 1 Tbit/s.

Thanks to detailed and accurate amplitude and phase patterns, the PSO-200 then performs in-depth pulse shape analysis for transmitter testing both in R.-D. and manufacturing environments.

Unique Analysis for Transmitter Testing and Troubleshooting

Advanced modulation formats in which the information is encoded—not only in the intensity but also in the phase of the signal—require a much more detailed and complex analysis of the signals and waveforms that include new measurements such as the error vector magnitude, polarization unbalance, quadrature error, etc. The PSO-200 offers the full flexibility for users to select the best views and measurements required to meet their needs.

Constellation, Eye Diagrams and Patterns

Important information about the quality of the signal transmitted can be recovered from the constellation diagram. The PSO-200 offers powerful analysis capabilities to identify issues such as quadrature errors, imbalance between the I and Q branches of the modulators, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) issues, etc. The large bandwidth of the PSO-200 allows precise recovery of constellation diagrams, including the transition information. Each polarization can also be analyzed as two I and Q eye diagrams or using time-domain patterns (e.g., as in the case of QPSK or DQPSK). What’s more, these diagrams provide additional information about the signal quality, such as information on skew, jitter and other timing issues.

Error Vector Magnitude

The quality of the transmitted signal can also be established by looking at the error vector magnitude, which compares the recovered signal to an ideal signal. The PSO-200 not only provides the value of the EVM but also its evolution over time.

The unique time-resolved error vector magnitude (EVM) analysis, developed by EXFO, allows user to quickly identify Tx impairments and apply masks for fast and precise pass/fail decision in manufacturing.

Bit-Error-Rate Analysis (optional)

In addition to providing extremely accurate signal analysis, the PSO-200 offers bit error-rate (BER) measurement capabilities that are normally only found in real-time sampling systems. When using any PRBS up to 216-1 or user-defined sequence of equivalent length, the PSO-200’s powerful algorithms can perform smart analysis of the data recovered to estimate the BER. Additionally, a powerful gearbox, an error summary and a visual representation of all errors in all graphs allow users to identify potential error sources faster.

Digital Filtering (optional)

Once the transmitter seems fully optimized, it can be interesting to see the impact of bandwidth-limited network elements, such as the receiver front-end on the signal. This can be simulated by applying a digital filter on the recovered signal. Butterworth, Bessel-Thomson and Chebyshev filters of any bandwidth and order up to eight are available in the PSO-200 and can be applied to the recovered signal.

Offline Processing (optional)

Now with the PSO-200, it has never been this easy to re-process the data acquired offline to perform more advanced analysis or validate the transmission parameters or quality, using customer-specific algorithms. With a touch of the Save function, EXCEL- and MatLAB-compatible files, including the raw data acquired, can easily be exported. Acquired traces are also stored in the PSO-200 proprietary format. All the files stored include the acquired traces and online analysis data, and since the PSO-200 software can be installed on any PC; this means that acquired traces and signals can be re-opened offline for further analysis—as if working on the instrument itself.