Understanding Arbitrary Waveform Generator Functional Building Blocks

Arbitrary waveform generators (AWGs) are the most versatile signal generators available.  An Arbitrary Waveform Generators high speed can generate any mathematically-characterized signal, including sine wave, pulse, modulated, multitone, polarized, and rotated signals. The AWG is commonly seen as the workhorse piece of test equipment and can perform the functions of any other generator type.  The signal flow through the functional blocks starts with a numeric description of a waveform stored in memory. Then the selected waveform samples are sent to a digital-to-analog converter (DAC), filtered, conditioned, amplified and output as an analog waveform.