Pico Technology PicoScope 6000E Series oscilloscopes

Pico Technology announces the PicoScope 6000E Series PC-based oscilloscopes, featuring eight channels with 500 MHz bandwidth, 16 digital channels and resolution of 8, 10 or 12 bits. This addresses challenges faced by engineers when debugging complex IoT and embedded systems that have mixed analog and digital elements, such as serial and parallel communications with high-speed low-voltage signalling.

FlexRes architecture allows the hardware to be configured by the user to optimise the sampling rate to 5 GS/s at 8-bit resolution or up to 12-bit resolution with 1.25 GS/s sampling. For diverse applications such as capturing and decoding fast digital signals, or looking for distortion in sensitive analog signals, flexible resolution allows both measurements to be made with the same oscilloscope.

Deep capture memory offers the ability to capture long-duration events while maintaining a high sample rate. The PicoScope 6824E, with 4 GS memory, can capture a 200 ms signal at a sampling rate of 5 GS/s, so 200 picoseconds resolution (a ratio of 1:1,000,000,000). Deep captures can be explored with the included waveform buffer navigator and zoomed in by up to a million times using the zoom/pan controls. Built-in tools for embedded systems debug include DeepMeasure, which captures the measurement results of each one in up to a million cycles.

The series utilises PicoScope 6 PC software — a graphical user interface that presents information in time, frequency and digital domains as required, showing clean, crisp waveforms on screens of any size and resolution. Mask limit testing and user-defined alarms are included, as well as capture memory segmentation from 1 to 10,000. The software includes decoders for 21 serial protocols as well as parallel bus decoding of the digital channels; more protocols will be deployed as updates in the future.

The series delivers high performance, with better than -50 dB harmonic distortion at 1 MHz on all models and over 60 dB SFDR (PicoScope 6824E). Baseline noise specification is <150 μV RMS on the most sensitive range. Other features include an integrated 200 MS/s arbitrary waveform generator (AWG) and 50 MHz function generator with built-in sine, square, triangle, DC voltage, ramp up, ramp down, Gaussian and half-sine functions.