Tektronix MSO4104B
1 GHz, 5 GS/s, 20M record length, 4+16 channel
Mixed Signal Oscilloscope

Feature-rich Tools for Debugging Mixed Signal Designs

With the Tektronix MSO4104B 1GHz, 5GS/s, 4+16 channel Digital Phosphor Mixed Signal 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 MSO4104B 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 MSO4104B 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 MSO4104B 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 MSO-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 MSO4104B 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 MSO/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 MSO 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.

To further help troubleshoot system-level interactions in complex embedded systems, the Tek MSO4000B Series offers 16 digital channels in addition to its analog channels. Since the digital channels are fully integrated into the oscilloscope, you can trigger across all input channels, automatically time correlating all analog, digital, and serial signals. The MagniVu high-speed acquisition enables you to acquire fine signal detail (up to 60.6 ps resolution) around the trigger point for precision measurements. MagniVu is essential for making accurate timing measurements for setup and hold, clock delay, signal skew, and glitch characterization.

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 MSO4104B 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 MSO 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 MSO/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 MSO/4104B Series.

The Tektronix MSO4104-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 MSO4104B 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 MSO/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.

Mixed Signal Design and Analysis

The Tektronix MSO4104B Series Mixed Signal Oscilloscopes provide 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.

Color-coded Digital Waveform Display
The Tektronix MSO 4104B 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. The Tektronix MSO4104B Series has color-coded digital traces, displaying ones in green and zeros in blue.

The multiple transition detection hardware of the Tektronix MSO4104B Series will show you a white edge on the display when the system detects multiple transitions. White edges indicate that more information is available by zooming in or acquiring at faster sampling rates. In most cases zooming in will reveal the pulse that was not viewable with the previous settings. If the white edge is still present after zooming in as far as possible, this indicates that increasing the sample rate on the next acquisition will reveal higher frequency information than the previous settings could acquire.

The Tektronix MSO-40/14B Series simplifies channel setup by allowing you to group digital waveforms and enter waveform labels by using a USB keyboard. By simply placing digital waveforms next to each other, they form a group. Once a group is formed, you can position all the channels contained in that group collectively. This greatly reduces the normal setup time associated with positioning channels individually.

MagniVu High-speed Acquisition
The main digital acquisition mode on the MSO4104B Series will capture up to 20M points at 500 MS/s (2 ns resolution). In addition to the main record, the MSO4104B Series provides an ultra high-resolution record called MagniVu which acquires 10,000 points at up to 16.5 GS/s (60.6 ps resolution). Both main and MagniVu waveforms are acquired on every trigger and can be switched between in the display at any time, running or stopped. MagniVu provides significantly finer timing resolution than comparable MSOs on the market, instilling confidence when making critical timing measurements on digital waveforms.