Tektronix DPO4104B
1 GHz, 5 GS/s, 20M record length, 4 channel
Digital Phosphor Oscilloscope

Feature-rich Tools for Debugging Mixed Signal Designs

With the Tektronix DPO4104B 1GHz, 5GS/s, 4+16 channel Digital Phosphor Oscilloscope you can analyze up to 20 analog and digital signals with a single instrument to quickly find and diagnose problems in complex designs. Bandwidths up to 1 GHz and a minimum of 5X oversampling on all channels ensure you have the performance you need to see fast-changing signal details. To capture long windows of signal activity while maintaining fine timing resolution, the Tektronix DPO4104B offers a deep record length of 20M points standard on all channels.

With Wave Inspector controls for rapid waveform navigation, automated serial and parallel bus analysis, limit and mask testing, and automated power analysis – the Tek DPO4104B Digital Phosphor Mixed Signal Oscilloscope from Tektronix provides the feature-rich tools you need to simplify and speed debug of your complex design.

Comprehensive Features Speed Every Stage of Debug

The Tektronix DPO4104B Series offers a robust set of features to speed every stage of debugging your design – from quickly discovering an anomaly and capturing it, to searching your waveform record for the event and analyzing its characteristics and your device's behavior.

Fast waveform capture rate - over 50,000 wfm/s - maximizes the probability of capturing elusive glitches and other infrequent events.

Discover
To debug a design problem, first you must know it exists. Every design engineer spends time looking for problems in their design, a time-consuming and frustrating task without the right debug tools.

The Tektronix DPO-4104-B offers the industry's most complete visualization of signals, providing fast insight into the real operation of your device. A fast waveform capture rate - greater than 50,000 waveforms per second - enables you to see glitches and other infrequent transients within seconds, revealing the true nature of device faults. A digital phosphor display with intensity grading shows the history of a signal's activity by intensifying areas of the signal that occur more frequently, providing a visual display of just how often anomalies occur.

Triggering on a specific transmit data packet going across an RS-232 bus.

Capture
Discovering a device fault is only the first step. Next, you must capture the event of interest to identify root cause.

Accurately capturing any signal of interest begins with proper probing. The Tektronix DPO4104B Series includes four low-capacitance probes for accurate signal capture. These industry-first high-impedance passive voltage probes have less than 4 pF of capacitive loading to minimize the affect of the probe on your circuit's operation, offering the performance of an active probe with the flexibility of a passive probe.

The Tektronix DPO/41040B Series provides a complete set of triggers – including runt, timeout, logic, pulse width/glitch, setup/hold violation, serial packet, and parallel data – to help quickly find your event. With up to a 20M point record length, you can capture many events of interest, even thousands of serial packets, in a single acquisition for further analysis while maintaining high resolution to zoom in on fine signal details.

From triggering on specific packet content to automatic decode in multiple data formats, the Tektronix DPO 4104B provides integrated support for the industry's broadest range of serial buses – I2C, SPI, USB, Ethernet, CAN, LIN, FlexRay, RS-232/422/485/UART, MIL-STD-1553, and I2S/LJ/RJ/TDM. The ability to decode up to four serial and/or parallel buses simultaneously means you gain insight into system-level problems quickly.

I2C decode showing results from a Wave Inspector search for Address value 50.

Search
Finding your event of interest in a long waveform record can be time consuming without the right search tools. With today's record lengths pushing beyond a million data points, locating your event can mean scrolling through thousands of screens of signal activity.

The Tektronix DPO4104B offers the industry's most comprehensive search and waveform navigation with its innovative Wave Inspector controls. These controls speed panning and zooming through your record. With a unique force-feedback system, you can move from one end of your record to the other in just seconds. User marks allow you to mark any location that you may want to reference later for further investigation. Or, automatically search your record for criteria you define. Wave Inspector will instantly search your entire record, including analog, digital, and serial bus data. Along the way it will automatically mark every occurrence of your defined event so you can quickly move between events.

Waveform histogram of a falling edge showing the distribution of edge position (jitter) over time.

Analyze
Verifying that your prototype's performance matches simulations and meets the project's design goals requires analyzing its behavior. Tasks can range from simple checks of rise times and pulse widths to sophisticated power loss analysis and investigation of noise sources.

The Tektronix DPO 4104/B offers a comprehensive set of integrated analysis tools including waveform- and screen-based cursors, 41 automated measurements, advanced waveform math including arbitrary equation editing, waveform histograms, FFT analysis, and trend plots for visually determining how a measurement is changing over time. Specialized application support for serial bus analysis, power supply design, limit and mask testing, and video design and development is also available.

Wave Inspector Navigation and Search

A 20M point record length represents thousands of screens of information. The Tektronix DPO/4104B Series enables you to find your event in seconds with Wave Inspector, the industry's best tool for navigation and search.

Wave Inspector offers the following innovative controls:

Zoom/Pan:
A dedicated, two-tier front-panel control provides intuitive control of both zooming and panning. The inner control adjusts the zoom factor (or zoom scale); turning it clockwise activates zoom and goes to progressively higher zoom factors, while turning it counterclockwise results in lower zoom factors and eventually turning zoom off. No longer do you need to navigate through multiple menus to adjust your zoom view. The outer control pans the zoom box across the waveform to quickly get to the portion of waveform you are interested in. The outer control also utilizes force feedback to determine how fast to pan on the waveform. The farther you turn the outer control, the faster the zoom box moves. Pan direction is changed by simply turning the control the other way.

Play/pause:
A dedicated Play/Pause front-panel button scrolls the waveform across the display automatically while you look for anomalies or an event of interest. Playback speed and direction are controlled using the intuitive pan control. Once again, turning the control further makes the waveform scroll faster and changing direction is as simple as turning the control the other way.

User Marks:
Press the Set Mark front-panel button to place one or more marks on the waveform. Navigating between marks is as simple as pressing the Previous and Next buttons on the front panel.

Search Marks:
The Search button allows you to automatically search through your long acquisition looking for user-defined events. All occurrences of the event are highlighted with search marks and are easily navigated to, using the front-panel Previous and Next buttons. Search types include edge, pulse width/glitch, timeout, runt, logic, setup and hold, rise/fall time, parallel bus, and I2C, SPI, USB, Ethernet, CAN, LIN, FlexRay, RS-232/422/485/UART, MIL-STD-1553, and I2S/LJ/RJ/TDM packet content.

Digital Phosphor Technology

Digital phosphor technology enables greater than 50,000 wfm/s waveform capture rate and real-time intensity grading on the DPO/4104B Series.

The Tektronix DPO4104-B's digital phosphor technology provides you with fast insight into the real operation of your device. Its fast waveform capture rate - greater than 50,000 wfm/s - gives you a high probability of quickly seeing the infrequent problems common in digital systems: runt pulses, glitches, timing issues, and more.

Waveforms are superimposed with one another and waveform points that occur more frequently are intensified. This quickly highlights the events that over time occur more often or, in the case of infrequent anomalies, occur less often.

With the Tektronix DPO4104B Series, you can choose infinite persistence or variable persistence (including zero persistence), determining how long the previous waveform acquisitions stay on-screen. This allows you to determine how often an anomaly is occurring.

Accurate High-speed Probing

The TPP Series probes, included standard with every Tektronix DPO/4104B Series oscilloscope, provide up to 1 GHz of analog bandwidth, and less than 4 pF of capacitive loading. The extremely low capacitive loading minimizes adverse affects on your circuits and is more forgiving of longer ground leads. And, since the probe bandwidth matches your oscilloscope bandwidth, you can see the high-frequency components in your signal which is critical for high-speed applications. The TPP Series passive voltage probes offer all the benefits of general-purpose probes like high dynamic range, flexible connection options, and robust mechanical design, while providing the performance of active probes.