Tektronix Speeds Debugging of Serial and Parallel Digital Signals for Embedded Designers

(Product News, 2 Jul 2009)

Tektronix Inc announced the MSO3000 Mixed Signal Oscilloscope Series. The series provides the embedded system designer with the ability to visualize and analyze analog, digital and serial signals on a single instrument. The MSO3000 Series offers the right mix of performance and price with up to four analog and 16 digital channels, 100 to 500 MHz bandwidth, 5M record length and 2.5 GS/s analog sample rate for system debug. With this addition to the MSO/DPO family, Tektronix now offers a complete range of performance options from 100MHz to 1GHz enabling design engineers to simplify and speed debugging of complex embedded systems.

In today’s market, embedded systems designers are looking for test solutions with the versatility to monitor digital, analog and serial data signals. This versatility is particularly important when performing system-level troubleshooting across a wide range of integrated components, such as microprocessors and microcontrollers, FPGAs, A/Ds, D/As, serial and parallel buses, embedded audio and switch-mode power supplies. At the same time, design engineers are under pressure to keep a tight rein on costs. Given its versatility, performance and high channel count, the mixed signal oscilloscope (MSO) has emerged as the tool of choice for design and debug of these advanced embedded systems.

For mixed signal design and analysis, the MSO3000 Series provides 16 digital channels. These channels are tightly integrated into the oscilloscope's user interface, simplifying operation and making it possible to solve mixed signal issues easily. The color-coded waveform display simplifies viewing of digital waveforms, displaying ones in green and zeros in blue. This makes it easy to recognize the logic state of a signal without having to scroll to a transition.
Digital waveforms can be grouped and labeled, greatly reducing setup time. MagniVu high speed acquisition provides confidence when making critical timing measurements on digital waveforms with the acquisition of 10,000 points at up to 8.25 GS/s (121.2 ps resolution), providing significantly finer timing resolution and capturing narrower glitches than comparable MSOs on the market.

The MSO3000 Series provides a comprehensive set of features to speed every stage of debugging a new design. Embedded system designers can easily discover intermittent problems with a 50,000 waveform per second capture rate and intensity-graded digital phosphor display technology. The designer can then capture signal anomalies and glitches with a complete set of triggers, including parallel data and serial packet content. The trigger is applied across all input channels and automatically time correlates all analog, digital and serial signals. Wave Inspector controls enable automatic search across all analog, digital, serial and parallel data signals for a specific event of interest. Wave Inspector will automatically mark every instance of the event enabling rapid navigation between them. Finally, the designer can quickly analyze signals with 29 automated measurements, advanced waveform math and specialized application support for serial bus analysis, power analysis and video debug.

Like other Tektronix MSO/DPO bench oscilloscopes, including the MSO/DPO4000 and MSO/DPO2000 Series, the MSO/DPO3000 Series enables embedded system designers to improve the performance of their designs and reduce time to market. For serial bus applications, a single signal often includes address, control, data and clock information. This can make isolating events of interest difficult. The MSO/DPO oscilloscopes offer a robust set of tools for debugging serial buses with automatic trigger, decode and search for I2C, SPI, RS-232/422/485/UART, CAN, LIN, and I2S/LJ/RJ/TDM standards.

Additional application support packages automate power measurements and perform HDTV and custom video analysis. To meet the need for longer battery life devices and for green solutions that consume less power, power-supply designers can now quickly and accurately analyze power quality, switching loss, harmonics, safe operating area (SOA), modulation, ripple, and slew rate (di/dt, dv/dt) and comply with national and regional power quality standards. The DPO3PWR power analysis module provides automated, repeatable power measurements with a touch of a button; no external PC or complex software setup is required. The DPO3PWRBND Power Analysis Solution Bundle combines all of the essential tools needed to perform typical power measurement and analysis tasks with savings up to 25 percent.

With the MSO/DPO oscilloscopes’ fast waveform capture rate and intensity-graded signal view, video engineers can now see more video signal detail and access standard features such as IRE and mV graticules, holdoff by fields, video polarity, and an Autoset smart enough to detect video signals. The optional DPO3VID application module provides the industry's most complete suite of HDTV and custom (non-standard) video triggers.