Unwanted artifacts are unavoidable in electrical sampling because of non-ideal impedance matching. Typically, oscilloscopes used for sampling high-speed telecom use hardware-based clock recovery and trigger. It's a costly and power-intensive solution that PicoSolve Inc., Fogelsville, Pa., avoids with its Optical Sampling Oscilloscope. The PSO101 uses fiber-based optical sampling and a proprietary software synchronization algorithm to display any repetitive optical intensity with one picosecond response times and without "ringing artifacts." The device can sample waveforms at any bit rate up to at least 640 Gbps, giving it an advantage in the telecom industry, which is rapidly moving to 40 Gbps and higher data rates. The user interface and data collection tasks are left to a standard PC, which helps give the PSO101 a significant size reduction and a 100-fold savings in power consumption. The system is designed to appeal to optical telecom hardware developers as well as researchers in medical fields or who use time-resolved spectroscopy.