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Serial-bus-decode features in ’scopes for embedded designers

Tektronix has announced a new series of oscilloscopes in what it terms the “value” sector, meaning the mid-range of ’scopes for “everyday” use on the engineer’s bench. The members of the DPO (digital phosphor oscillosopes) 3000 series have real-time bandwidths from 100 to 500 MHz and use a widescreen format for their LCD panels. They are, according to Tektronix’ product marketing manager Mark Briscoe, the first ’scopes in the sector with long—5M-point—record length. They feature a waveform-capture rate of up to 50,000/sec and, throughout the range, sample at 2.5G-samples/sec on all channels. The DPO feature set, Briscoe adds, is oriented to finding infrequent transients and revealing waveform characteristics over time with the synthesised variablepersistence feature. You can adjust the record length: the default setting is 10k points. Embedded-system designers are the principal target users of the series, and the ’scopes have triggering and decode support for the most popular serial buses—I²C, CAN, LIN, SPI and RS232 and its derivates.

Long records can represent thousands of screens’ worth of signal activity; to sort through them, Tektronix has included its Wave Inspector feature, which provides a dedicated, two-tier front-panel knob for zooming and panning. A play/ pause feature with adjustable speed controls scrolling of the waveform across the screen; you can also search through an acquisition and automatically mark all occurrences of specific events.

On the bench, the instruments occupy the increasingly familiar slim—in-depth—format, 5.4 in. (13.7 cm) deep. They employ a 9-in. (22.9 cm) WVGA display, and rather than use the extra area in the display for data, Tektronix has employed the full horizontal pixel count to show as much waveform resolution as possible. Software decodes serial buses with logic-analyser- style features, which come with “personality” modules for each serial bus the user needs to examine. On-screen, you can see the bus traffi c decoded to bit, binary and hex values; software engineers can opt for a tabular display of bus events. The scopes all have the software built-in; you buy a hardware key to enable the particular bus-feature set, and each ’scope has two slots for these “dongles”. If you have several 3000 ’scopes, you can pass the key around to whichever bench is working with the relevant bus at any time. The modules cost €837, or €529 for the version that enables high-definition video triggering. When you first turn on a new scope, all of the bus-personalities are enabled for a 30-day trial period.

There are Ethernet and USB ports, and with the TekVPI probe interfaces, there is an additional option for video—and especially HD video—probing, of a 75 termination. Prices range from €3760 for a two-channel DPO3012 to €9220 for a four-channel DPO3054, over six models that also include a 300-MHz real-time-bandwidth option.

Tektronix, www.tektronix.com.