Tektronix MSO2012 · MSO2014
100 MHz Mixed Signal Digital Phosphor Oscilloscopes

Wave Inspector® Navigation and Search

Imagine trying to efficiently use the Internet if search engines such as Google and Yahoo didn't exist and Web browser features such as Favorites and Links didn't exist. Now you know how most modern oscilloscope users feel when trying to use the long record length in their digital oscilloscope. Record length, one of the key specifications of an oscilloscope, is the number of samples it can digitize and store in a single acquisition. The longer the record length, the longer the time window you can capture with high timing resolution (high sample rate).

The first digital oscilloscopes could capture and store only 500 points, which made it very difficult to acquire all relevant information around the event being investigated. Over the years, oscilloscope vendors have provided longer and longer record lengths to meet market demands for long capture windows with high resolution. These mega-point record lengths often represent thousands of screens worth of signal activity. While standard record lengths have increased greatly over the years and can now satisfy the vast majority of applications in the marketplace, tools for effectively and efficiently viewing, navigating, and analyzing long record length acquisitions have been sorely neglected until now.

The Tektronix MSO2000 Series redefines expectations for working with long record lengths with the following innovative Wave Inspector controls:

Play/Pause – A dedicated play/pause button on the front panel 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.

Search Marks – Don't want to take the time to inspect the entire acquisition manually to find the event you're looking for? The MSO/DPO2000 Series features a robust automatic waveform search feature that allows you to search through your long acquisition based on user-defined criteria. 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, runt, logic, setup and hold, rise/fall time and parallel, I2C, SPI, RS-232/422/485/UART, CAN, and LIN packet content.

Try out the MSO/DPO2000 Virtual Oscilloscope at:
http://www.testequipmentdepot.com/tektronix/flash/msodso.htm

One of the most common applications requiring long record length is serial data analysis in embedded system design. Embedded systems are virtually everywhere. They can contain many different types of devices including microprocessors, microcontrollers, DSPs, RAM, EEPROMs, FPGAs, ADCs, DACs, and I/O. These various devices have traditionally communicated with each other and the outside world using wide parallel buses. Today, however, more and more embedded systems are replacing these wide parallel buses with serial buses due to lower board space requirements, fewer pins, lower power, embedded clocks, differential signaling for better noise immunity and most importantly, lower cost. In addition, there's a large supply of off-the-shelf building block components from reputable manufacturers, enabling rapid design development.

While serial buses have a large number of benefits, they also present significant challenges that their predecessors (parallel buses) did not face. They make debugging bus and system problems more difficult, it's harder to isolate events of interest and it's more difficult to interpret what is displayed on the oscilloscope screen. The MSO2000 and DPO2000 Series address these challenges and represent the ultimate tool for engineers working with serial buses such as I2C, SPI, RS-232/422/485/UART, CAN, and LIN.

Serial Triggering – Trigger on packet content such as start of packet, specific addresses, specific data content, unique identifiers, etc., on popular serial interfaces – I2C, SPI, RS-232/422/485/UART, CAN, and LIN.

Bus Decoding – Tired of having to visually inspect the waveform to count clocks and determine if each bit is a 1 or a 0, and then combine bits into bytes and determine the hex value? Let the oscilloscope do it for you! Once you've set up a bus, the oscilloscope will decode each packet on the bus and display the value in either hex, binary, decimal (LIN only), or ASCII (RS-232/422/485/UART only) in the bus waveform.

Search – Serial triggering is very useful for isolating an event of interest, but once you've captured it and need to analyze the surrounding data, what do you do? In the past, you had to manually scroll through the waveform, counting and converting bits and looking for what caused the event. With the MSO2000 and DPO2000 Series, you can have the oscilloscope automatically search through the acquired data for user-defined criteria including serial packet content. Each occurrence is marked for easy reference. Rapid navigation between marks is as simple as pressing the Previous (¬) and Next (®) buttons on the front panel.

The P6316 digital probe
for MSO2000 Series simplifies
connection to the device-under-test

As an embedded-design engineer, you are faced with the challenge of ever-increasing system complexity. A typical embedded design may incorporate various analog signals, high- and low-speed serial digital communication and microprocessor buses, just to name a few. Serial protocols such as I2C and SPI are used frequently for chip-to-chip communication, but parallel buses are still used in many applications. Microprocessors, FPGAs, Analog-to-Digital Converters (ADCs), and Digital-to-Analog Converters (DACs) are all examples of ICs that present unique measurement challenges in today's embedded designs. The MSO2000 Series Mixed Signal Oscilloscopes offer the addition of 16 digital channels. These channels are tightly integrated into the oscilloscope's user interface, simplifying operation and making it possible to solve mixed signal issues easily.

In a continued effort to make mixed signal oscilloscopes easy to use, the MSO2000 Series has redefined the way you view digital waveforms. One common problem shared by both logic analyzers and mixed signal oscilloscopes is determining if data is a one or a zero when zoomed in far enough that the digital trace stays flat all the way across the display.

This unique probe design offers two eight-channel pods and simplifies the process of connecting to the device-under-test. When connecting to square pins, the P6316 can connect directly to 8x2 square pin headers spaced on tenth-inch centers. When more attachment flexibility is required, you can use the included flying lead sets and grabbers to clip onto surface mount devices or test points. The P6316 offers outstanding electrical characteristics applying only 8 pF of loading with 101 kΩ input impedance.

Tired of being limited to a 20 MHz bandwidth filter in your oscilloscope? Simply turn on FilterVu and adjust the variable low-pass noise filter. Unlike other variable low-pass filters, FilterVu filters out the unwanted noise from your signal while still capturing glitches and other signal details up to the full bandwidth of the oscilloscope. It does this by showing two waveforms: a waveform that can be filtered (foreground waveform) and a glitch capture waveform (background waveform).

The glitch capture waveform shows signal details up to the full bandwidth of the oscilloscope. The oscilloscope captures pulses as narrow as 5 ns, using peak detect min/max sampling, protecting you from missing unexpected glitches or other high-frequency events.

FilterVu is ideal for repetitive, nonrepetitive, and single-shot events.

The MSO2000 and DPO2000 Series provides flexibility in data transfer with standard USB host and device ports which enable removable data storage, seamless PC connectivity, and direct printing. Also available are optional GPIB, LAN, and Video-Out adaptors.

Easily capture, save, and
analyze measurement results.

The TekVPI probe interface sets the standard for ease of use in probing. TekVPI probes feature status indicators and controls, as well as a probe menu button right on the input compensation box itself. This button brings up a probe menu on the oscilloscope display with all relevant settings and controls for the probe. The TekVPI interface utilizes a new probe power management architecture enabling direct attachment of current probes (Requires TekVPI External Power Supply – Tektronix Part number: 119-7465-xx). Finally, TekVPI probes can be controlled remotely by using USB, GPIB, or Ethernet, enabling more versatile solutions in ATE environments.