I was playing around yesterday with the AWG on my Agilent 3000x (yes, yes, I can't stop playing with the scope) and was trying to generate a very narrow glitch on a fast sine wave to see if I could then detect it with the scope.
I started with a 1Mhz 600mVpp sine wave and tried to put a 20mv glitch with the waveform editor. Forgetting for the moment that the AWG on the scope has a rise time of 17ns, I made the pulse only a few points long
. I got an interesting wobble on the sine wave, but not anything like what I had drawn.
This brings me to the idea. All of these AWG in the low price range, actually even the Agilent $2000 models, have fairly slow rise times (usually around 8 to 10ns). With the ability to use the tinylogic buffer chips to get 600ps rise times, I am thinking of some sort of add-on device that can either sharpen the output of a square or pulse wave from the AWG, or add a glitch to an existing waveform. I haven't really thought this through very well, but I suspect you would need at minimum a trigger signal from the AWG along with a programmable delay to select when you insert the glitch. Programmable gain for the amplitude of the glitch or pulse would be nice. Obviously we are talking quite a bit more circuitry than a simple buffer. What do you guys think? Even possible? A worthy project?
For reference, I had been watching this video and was just curious if I could duplicate anything close on the 3000x: