Oscilloscopes What’s the latest?

Debugging and design solutions have been the main uses of an oscilloscope. While it still is used to diagnose a faulty electrical component, it has become increasingly common for people to use them as automated verification tools. To keep up with the users’ demands and to meet the challenges of complex embedded designs, manufacturers now offer a wide range of oscilloscope solutions.

By Richa Chakravarty

Wednesday, July 09, 2012: What players offer

The latest types of oscilloscopes provide state of the art design and debugging solutions for electrical machinery, apart from numerous features that are relevant to the automotive, aerospace and telecom segments.

These help engineers complete their diagnosis and analysis jobs quickly and more efficiently. These oscilloscopes offer best in class usability with extensive triggers to identify elusive anomalies. They also come with comprehensive tools to navigate waveforms and track down signal problems.

Kusam Electricals offers digital storage oscilloscopes (DSOs) with frequency bandwidths of

25 MHz, 40 MHz and 100 MHz. Describing their features, Chandmal Goliya, managing director, Kusam Electrical Industries Ltd, says, “These scopes (oscilloscopes) provide a real time sample rate of 1 GSa per second with a high input impedance of 1M Ohms/13 pF. They come with four trigger modes including edge, video, pulse and delay. They also have math functions and can store 10 waveforms and 10 setups.”

Good Will Instruments (GW Instek) offers its GDS-3000 series of DSOs. This is an innovative testing platform providing a bandwidth of up to 350 MHz with four analogue input channels, 5GSa/s and VPO technology (visual persistence oscilloscope). Beside this, the instruments are also equipped with an innovative split screen system that has independent horizontal settings, vertical settings and triggers. Informs Sumit Sharma, marketing manager, Good Will Instrument Co Ltd, “New generation of VPO oscilloscopes are equipped with the characteristics of analogue oscilloscopes and numerous features of second generation DSO, including; waveform storage, math operations, automatic measurements and other accurate measurement functions. With all these features, GDS-3000 is the best instrument for analysing intermittent events and video signals.”

Expanding its product range, Rhode and Schwarz recently launched RTO 1044 series. With 4 GHz bandwidth, 20 GSamples/sec, 20/80 Msamples (standard), 4 Channel DSO, this scope offers maximum waveform acquisition rate of 1,000,000 waveforms/sec. “With the above launch, we are offering 600 MHz, 1 GHz, 2

GHz and 4 GHz bandwidth scopes in RTO family. All these scopes can be upgraded to MSO with RTO B1 option. The MSO options provide 16 digital channels, 200 MSamples memory and 5 GSamples/sec sampling rate on every channel,” shares Nasser Salim Jariwala, head business development and regional manager, west India, Rhode & Schwarz. Fast in its performance, this series reduces the blind time between acquisitions and decreases the time to catch rare signal faults in modern complex designs. Also, its unique digital trigger offers advantages low trigger, jitter in real time and highest trigger sensitivity.

Agrees Praveen Kumar Gupta, director, Avante Global Services, “New DSOs are very robust. Also, the prices of DSOs have crashed and the technological features offered by them make them an obvious choice with the users. Moreover, under normal usage, there is hardly any maintenance cost.” Avante Global is a distributor that offers a wide spectrum of DSOs, starting from basic 50 MHz versions to 350 MHz high sampling, four-channel scopes. The starting price range of these

scopes is below Rs 30,000.

Adds JK Baldua, technical director, Scientech Technologies Pvt Ltd, “Higher real time sampling rate in DSO and combining them with logic analyser and spectrum

analyser distinguishes these scopes from the one’s available in

the market.” With various brands under its umbrella, Scientech offers Tektronix and Rigol Nvis DSOs up to 300 MHz bandwidth and 2Gsps sampling rate and Caddo analogue scopes up to 100 MHz bandwidth.

Adding to the gamut of feature rich scopes is LeCroy Corporation’s highest bandwidth (45 GHz) real time Wave Master 8Zi-A, a powerful mid range oscilloscope. “Our new product—the WaveRunner 6Zi oscilloscope, offers advanced features including a tilting display that helps designers choose the best screen orientation for viewing,” says Prabhanjana Rao, country manager, LeCroy Corporation.

Fluke offers two channel and four channel handheld oscilloscopes ranging from 20 MHz to 200 MHz. These scopes combine the functions of an oscilloscope, digital multimeter and a trend plot recorder. Says P Sridharan, product manager, scopemeters, Fluke India, “As these scopes are able to render complete isolated inputs, floating measurements, battery operation and CAT IV safety, they are suitable for field use, especially to test the characteristics of variable speed drives. Their USB host port allows the recording of the waveform in an external media by simply connecting USB

memory sticks.”

A technological innovation from Agilent—the MegaVision IV is a custom designed 90-nm CMOS ASIC with 6M gates and embedded memory and is the heart of the

InfiniiVision X-Series scopes. This MegaZoom IV single chip architecture enables the industry’s fastest waveform update rates and responsive deep memory along with integrated logic analyser, arbitrary function generator, and protocol analyser functionality so engineers and educators have highly advanced scope performance at economical prices. Also, the innovative chipset designed in

Agilent’s proprietary high speed high voltage InP HBT resulted in a 33 GHz true analogue bandwidth scope.

The InfiniiScan software introduced by Agilent Technologies enables oscilloscopes to identify signal integrity issues that hardware triggering is unable to find in electronic designs. It scans through thousands of acquired waveforms per second to help isolate signal anomalies. “Designers who want quick identification of signal anomalies in their designs, and who have traditionally relied on hardware triggering and deep memory to capture such illusive events, can now easily overcome the limitations of hardware triggering by using this software,” states Sadaf

Arif Siddiqui, technical marketing specialist, Agilent Technologies.

Yokogawa offers scopes with high speed, high resolution and channel to channel isolation. Its ISOPRO core technology is designed with energy saving

applications in mind. It gives the performance needed to develop high efficiency inverters that employ high voltage, large

currents and high operating speeds. Also, its Gigazoom 2 engine instantaneously zooms into two locations. This helps to pinpoint the waveform anomalies over a long recording period with accuracy.

Tektronix has introduced six new MSO/DPO4000B oscilloscope models. “With high speed buses like USB 2.0 and Ethernet embedded in designs, these scopes are faster, more capable and have at least 1 GHz bandwidth. This, in turn, has created a need for more flexibility in terms of the number of channels and the record length, at this level of performance,” explains Sai Venkat Kumar, country marcom, Tektronix. Typically, 1 GHz oscilloscopes come with 500 MHz probes, requiring an additional investment for testing higher speed signals. In contrast to this, the MSO/DPO4000B series from Tektronix includes one TPP1000 1 GHz passive probe per analogue channel. This general purpose probe features extremely low 3.9 pF capacitive loading for visibility into the high frequency signal details found in USB 2.0 and Ethernet devices.

Co-developed by National Instruments and Tektronix, the NI PXIe-5185 and NI PXIe-5186 deliver a new level of performance in a small form factor and low power

PXI platform. The digital backend of PXI Express uses NI synchronisation and memory core (SMC) technology to deliver high data throughputs at rates greater than 700 MBps and multi-module synchronisation with a ± 80ps channel-to-channel

skew. “The NI PXI-5922 is a dual channel flexible resolution digitiser with the highest resolution and highest dynamic range of any digitiser in the market. It maximises vertical resolution based on the selected sample rate, from 24 bits at rates up to 500

kS/s, to 16 bits at 15 MS/s. This unparalleled flexibility and resolution is also achieved with NI Flex II ADC technology, which uses an enhanced multi-bit delta-sigma converter and patented techniques for linearisation,” says Nandini Subramanya, marketing and communications manager, National Instruments India.

Some of the key players in the oscilloscope domain

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