News | July 21, 2010

ZTEC Instruments Expands Product Line To Offer RF Test Equipment

ZTEC Instruments, the leader in modular oscilloscopes and waveform generators, announced that it will expand into the Radio Frequency test equipment market with their first RF product, the ZT8441 RF/IF Digitizer, available in PXI, PCI, VXI and LXI.

ZTEC Instruments teams with Astronics DME Corporation to jointly develop a high performance RF/IF digitizer. "ZTEC Instruments currently offers an impressive selection of oscilloscopes and waveform generators. Expanding into the RF market was a natural technological adjacency for us given our partnership with Astronics DME Corporation, leaders in Radio Test Solutions," said ZTEC Instruments' CEO Christopher Ziomek. "In fact, some of our customers are already using our current products for RF solutions," added Ziomek.

"Teaming with ZTEC Instruments allows us to deliver our cutting edge RTS Intellectual Property to a broader customer base. The ZT8441 includes our wideband Digital Down Converter FPGA IP for high speed measurement capability" said Astronics DME Corporation General Manager and Executive Vice President Brian Price. The quick introduction and release of the ZT8441 is made possible because it is closely matched to ZTEC Instruments' current hardware used in oscilloscopes and waveform generators.

The ZT8441 RF/IF Digitizer comes standard with a full featured, on-instrument spectrum analyzer, and is poised to supply the rapidly growing RF market with a world-class testing solution at a competitive price. The ZT8441 is equipped with future-proof technical specifications including:

  • Real-time Quadrature DDC with fractional resampling and decimation
  • Vector signal analysis capability of an ultra wide, 156.25MHz instantaneous bandwidth
  • Extremely low noise floor and a high dynamic range
  • Fast switching and all-digital frequency hopping
  • Real-time highly flexible FPGA processing

The ZT8441 leverages ZTEC Instruments' value-add to modular instruments by providing an intuitive GUI, ZSignal provides advanced integration and support with a simple and familiar interface to ease the transition from a bench-top spectrum analyzer to its modular instrument counterpart. ZSignal was built in accordance with award-winning ZScope and ZWave platforms to minimize the time needed to integrate the instrument into both new and legacy software.

The ZT8441 provides a true modular architecture for synthetic instrumentation because it is designed to be interoperable with 3rd party RF modules such as an RF down converter. In addition, the RF/IF digitizer offers bus master control of those RF instruments for speed and deterministic operations.

"ZTEC Instruments is committed to providing our customers with a distinctly lower-cost solution with superior bandwidth, sample rate, dynamic range, and integrated DDC," Ziomek states. "As we exemplify with our latest product release, the ZT8441, ZTEC will continue to develop products that drive efficiency, set industry standards, and that our customers can rely on. We are extremely pleased with our expansion into the RF Test Equipment market with our future-proof specifications, our more advanced integration and support, true modular architecture for synthetic instrumentation, and our competitive pricing structure."

About ZTEC Instruments
ZTEC Instruments is a leading modular instrument company whose product focus includes oscilloscopes, waveform generators, and RF Test Equipment. ZTEC Instruments' products are unique in that they provide powerful bench-top instrument capabilities in modular instrument form factors, including PCI, Compact PCI/PXI, VXI, and LXI. For more information,visit http://www.ztecinstruments.com.

About Astronics Corporation
Astronics Corporation is a leader in advanced, high performance lighting, electrical power and automated test systems for the global aerospace and defense industries. The Company's strategy is to develop and maintain positions of technical leadership in its chosen aerospace and defense markets, to leverage those positions to grow the amount of content and volume of product it sells to those markets and to selectively acquire businesses with similar technical capabilities that could benefit from our leadership position and strategic direction. Astronics Corporation, and its wholly-owned subsidiaries, DME Corporation, Astronics Advanced Electronic Systems Corp. and Luminescent Systems Inc., have a reputation for high quality designs, exceptional responsiveness, strong brand recognition and best-in-class manufacturing practices. For more information, visit www.astronics.com.

SOURCE: ZTEC Instruments