Latest Tektronix oscilloscopes offer embedded systems designers high performance, ease of use, and serial debug
(Technology News, 30 Apr 2008 )
Tektronix has announced the availability of the DPO3000 Digital Phosphor Oscilloscopes (DPOs), a portable series of models that extends the advantages first introduced with the award-winning DPO/MSO 4000 series. The new DPO3000 provides triggering and decode support for the most popular serial buses used in embedded design applications. Additionally, the new oscilloscopes offer 5M standard record length and utilize the popular Wave Inspector™ navigation and search controls to simplify finding events of interest. The new portable DPO3000 simplifies debug and sets new standards for performance, value, and ease-of-use.
Virtually every electronic product designed and produced today is an embedded system and may contain microprocessors, microcontrollers, DSPs, RAM, flash, EPROM’s, FPGAs, A/Ds, D/As, and other I/O. Increasingly, embedded system designs are replacing internal parallel buses with serial buses such as I2C, SPI, and CAN. On a serial bus, a single signal may include address, control, data, and clock information; the complexity presents significant debug challenges for design engineers. The DPO3000 Series addresses these problems with the most complete set of tools for working with industry standard serial buses such as I2C, SPI, RS-232/422/485/UART, CAN and LIN.
“Through innovative features such as Wave Inspector and comprehensive support for the serial data standards most often used in embedded designs, the DPO3000 family of oscilloscopes will meet the pressing debug needs of design engineers,” said Bob Bluhm, vice president and general manager, Value Scope Product Line, Tektronix. “With many best-in-class features, the DPO3000 is ideal for engineers needing to more quickly and efficiently find elusive design problems and stay on their product development schedule.”
Wave Inspector Quickly Locates Difficult to Find Problems
Longer records are necessary for capturing meaningful serial data with high resolution, and allow engineers to spend less time adjusting triggers. In response, the DPO3000 provides 5M deep memory as standard. However, long records often represent thousands of screens worth of signal activity, making it challenging to quickly find information specific to a design problem. The DPO3000 Series Wave Inspector makes simple and efficient work of extracting needed answers.
Wave Inspector provides a dedicated, two-tier front panel knob for intuitive control of zooming and panning. A play/pause feature with adjustable speed enables customers to automatically scroll the waveform across the screen while they look for the event of interest. Wave Inspector also provides the ability to search through an acquisition and automatically mark all occurrences of user-specified events, and navigate between them effortlessly. With Wave Inspector, the DPO3000 provides easy-to-use tools to quickly find and solve difficult problems.
Most Capable Portable Oscilloscope
The DPO3000 oscilloscope family consists of six models, ranging from 100 MHz to 500 MHz. All models provide 2.5 GS/s sampling with >5x oversampling on all channels. 5M record length is standard on all channels enabling the capture of long time windows of signal activity with very high resolution.
Not only is the DPO3000 the most capable professional oscilloscope in its segment of the market, at only 5.4 inches deep, it is also the shallowest -- requiring less bench space than competing products -- and weighs only nine pounds for enhanced portability. The DPO3000 also provides exceptional value with Wave Inspector, serial triggering, protocol decode, USB plug-and-play PC connectivity, a 9” WVGA display to show more detail in the horizontal axis to better see glitches and fine details that otherwise might be missed, and the smallest footprint in its class.
The new models also offer a USB host (thumb drive) on the front panel enabling easy transfer of screenshots, setups and waveform data to a PC. All models include Ethernet and a USB device (TMC) port on the rear of the instrument that enables plug-and-play PC connectivity. Additionally, all models provide the TekVPI probe interface that fosters communication between the DPO3000 and TekVPI probes. A variety of TekVPI voltage and current probes are available. The DPO3VID Video Application Module adds a comprehensive set of HDTV and custom video triggers. This module combined with built-in, selectable 75W termination make the DPO3000 a great instrument for designs that incorporate modern video standards. No other similar instrument provides both HDTV triggering and built-in 75W termination.
