Synthesis and generation of critical waveforms by means of AWG

The generation of complex waveforms is necessary to comply with the more and more stringent requirements of the modern standards concerned with electronic systems test and measurement. The arbitrary waveform generators (AWGs) available on the market provide flexible solutions to generate a number of test signals. In fact, AWGs operate as multifunction generators, support many modulation formats, and allow the user to customize the output waveform. When dealing with relatively cheap, though very popular AWGs used on direct digital synthesis (DDS), the synthesis and generation of a class of modulated waveforms, which are of interest for several applications, can still be challenging. For these applications, the quality of measurement results strictly depends on the ability of the technician to overcome the obstacles, and produce a generated waveform of good quality. In the paper, the synthesis of some critical waveforms is discussed and feasible solutions to generate them by means of AWGs are proposed.