Oscilloscopes for embedded systems designers

BEAVERTON, USA: Tektronix Inc. has announced the availability of the DPO3000 Digital Phosphor Oscilloscopes (DPOs), a portable series of models that extends the advantages first introduced with the award-winning DPO/MSO 4000 series.

The new DPO3000 provides triggering and decode support for the most popular serial buses used in embedded design applications. Additionally, the oscilloscopes offer 5M standard record length and utilize the popular Wave Inspector navigation and search controls to simplify finding events of interest. The new portable DPO3000 simplifies debug and sets new standards for performance, value, and ease-of-use.

Virtually every electronic product designed and produced today is an embedded system and may contain microprocessors, microcontrollers, DSPs, RAM, flash, EPROM’s, FPGAs, A/Ds, D/As, and other I/O. Increasingly, embedded system designs are replacing internal parallel buses with serial buses such as I2C, SPI, and CAN.

On a serial bus, a single signal may include address, control, data, and clock information; the complexity presents significant debug challenges for design engineers. The DPO3000 Series addresses these problems with the most complete set of tools for working with industry standard serial buses such as I2C, SPI, RS-232/422/485/UART, CAN and LIN.

Longer records are necessary for capturing meaningful serial data with high resolution, and allow engineers to spend less time adjusting triggers. In response, the DPO3000 provides 5M deep memory as standard.  However, long records often represent thousands of screens worth of signal activity, making it challenging to quickly find information specific to a design problem. The DPO3000 Series Wave Inspector makes simple and efficient work of extracting needed answers.

Wave Inspector provides a dedicated, two-tier front panel knob for intuitive control of zooming and panning.   A play/pause feature with adjustable speed enables customers to automatically scroll the waveform across the screen while they look for the event of interest. It also provides the ability to search through an acquisition and automatically mark all occurrences of user-specified events, and navigate between them effortlessly.  With Wave Inspector, the DPO3000 provides easy-to-use tools to quickly find and solve difficult problems.