Mixed signal ’scopes

Tektronix has released the MSO2000 mixed signal and DPO2000 digital phosphor oscilloscopes.

The series provides tools to debug mixed signals including Wave Inspector search and navigation tools, automatic decoding of serial data buses and FilterVu variable low-pass filters to reduce unwanted noise from signals.

With bandwidths up to 200 MHz, the series complements the existing MSO4000, DPO4000 and DPO3000 oscilloscopes.

Virtually every electronic product designed and produced today is an embedded system and may contain microprocessors, microcontrollers, DSPs, RAM, flash, EEPROMs, FPGAs, A/Ds, D/As and other I/O.

Embedded systems have replaced parallel buses with serial data buses such as I²C, SPI, RS232, CAN and LIN.

On a serial bus, a single signal may include address, control, data and clock information.

The series address these problems with integrated serial data triggering, protocol decoding and analysis capabilities.

The MSO2000 can time-correlate analog and digital signals with up to four analog and 16 digital channels, for troubleshooting the mixed signal portions of embedded systems.

The series consists of six models ranging from 100 to 200 MHz, with two or four analog channels, front-panel layout, serial triggering, protocol decode, USB plug-and-play PC connectivity and 7" widescreen bright TFT display.

The MSO2000 models also include 16 digital channels, providing up to 20 time-correlated channels to debug both analog and digital data.

All models contain 1 Mpoints of record length on each channel and a 1 GS/s sampling rate on all channels.

They provide 5000 waveforms per second capture rate.

The FilterVu variable low-pass filter blocks unwanted noise from signals while still capturing glitches and other signal details up to the full bandwidth.

They are said to be the only oscilloscopes to simultaneously display the filtered waveform and high-frequency details up to the full bandwidth.

The series includes the Wave Inspector search engine that finds events of interest in long records. It can automatically search through an acquisition and mark all occurrences of a user-specified event then navigate between the marks.