Tek focuses on mid-range price/performance with 2-GHz scope launch

EDN Europe, 07 Dec 2010

In its latest oscilloscope announcement, Tektronix has focused on the mid-range, 350 MHz to 2 GHz, segment of the market, and has introduced a new mixed-signal ’scope range, together with a series of measurement probes. For the embedded-system designer, the combination provides a significant advance in performance, usability, and cost-effectiveness, Tek says. As with other recent instrumentation product introductions, Tek’s design team has migrated features from higher-specification instrument ranges, into the new MSO/DPO (mixed-signal oscilloscope/digital phosphor oscilloscope) 5000 series, which comprises eight models, starting with analogue bandwidths of 350 MHz and sample rates of 5 Gsamples/sec, and extending to analogue bandwidths of 2 GHz and sample rates of 10 Gsamples/sec. The instruments have record depths of 12.5million points to 250million points. All are 4-channel units, and the MSO, once again mirroring previous practice in TEk’s product ranges, have 16 digital channels, with parallel bus trigger and decode functions. You can buy a ’scope as a DPO and add the MSO features in a later upgrade.

In previous instrument introductions, Tektronix has drawn attention to waveform capture rate as an important attribute of an oscilloscope that helps you find obscure fault conditions. The 5000-series instruments have the FastAcq feature, that Tek has used on, for example, its DPO 7000 series ’scopes, that yields a maximum capture rate of over 250,000 waveforms per second; and the FastFrame segmented memory architecture. You can, the company says, capture long time periods at high resolution, then deploy built-in tools to carry out analysis of embedded systems. With the mixed-signal versions you have triggers that identify serial and parallel bus conditions, and the 5000s also have Tek’s Wave Inspector search capability to examine an entire acquisition of up to 250Mpoints to find user-specified events and mark every occurrence.
You can trigger on all input channels, including the 16 digital channels, resulting in correlated time-measurements of analogue, digital, and bus signals. The MagniVu high resolution acquisition mode acquires up to 10,000 points at up to 16.5 Gsamples/sec, equating to 60.6 psec resolution). You might use MagniVu, another feature that Tek has used previously on its faster ’scopes, for timing measurements of setup and hold, clock delay, signal skew, and glitch characterisation. As standard, the 5000-series instruments come with support for I2C, SPI, RS-232 and USB 2.0 serial buses. Options add jitter and eye pattern analysis, limit and mask testing, serial compliance tests, power measurements, and DDR memory analysis.

As system speeds rise, probing becomes an ever-greater issue. Alongside the 5000 series instruments, Tek has also announced the TPP1000 and TPP0500 1-GHz bandwidth passive voltage probes. Tek engineers say that these probes offer you the best features of passive types, such as high input dynamic range, mechanical robustness, and reasonable cost, while delivering performance in the same class as an active probe. Tek confirms that circuit loading is a major concern for its customers and says that these probes present around half the capacitive loading of earlier designs. They present 10 MΩ input resistance, and capacitive loading of 3.9 pF, at the probe tip: passive probes more commonly have around 9.5 pF input capacitance, at best, Tek says. You get a set of the new probes as standard with every MSO/DPO5000 instrument, and also with the newly-upgraded MSO/DPO4000B Series model, that has up to 1 GHz analogue bandwidth. Added features include support for Ethernet (10BASE-T and 100BASE-TX) and MIL-STD-1553 buses with limit and mask testing. The unit offers a ’scope-based platform on which to carry out trigger, decode and search analysis of Ethernet buses.
Physically, the 5000-series oscilloscopes use the now-familiar minimum-depth portable format to take up as little bench space as possible, and with a height of five standard rack units, you can also adapt them to an ATE context. Pricing ranges from €10,200-€24,400 for MSO/DPO5000 Series oscilloscopes and from €9,270-€18,100 for MSO/DPO4000B Series oscilloscopes. Additional TPP1000 and TPP0500 probes cost €789and €521 respectively.