Feature-Rich Tools for Debugging Mixed Signal Designs

With the MSO/DPO3000 Mixed Signal Oscilloscope Series, 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 500 MHz and a minimum of 5X oversampling on all channels ensure you have the performance you need for many of today's mainstream applications. To capture long windows of signal activity while maintaining fine timing resolution, the MSO/DPO3000 offers a deep record length of 5 Mpoints standard on all channels.

With Wave Inspector controls for rapid waveform navigation, automated serial and parallel bus analysis, and automated power analysis – the MSO/DPO3000 Oscilloscope Series 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 MSO/DPO3000 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.

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 MSO/DPO3000 Series 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.

Capture

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

 The MSO/DPO3000 Series provides a complete set of triggers – including runt, logic, pulse width/glitch, setup/hold violation, serial packet, and parallel data – to help quickly find your event. With up to a 5 Mpoint 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 MSO/DPO3000 Series provides integrated support for the industry’s broadest range of serial buses – I²C, SPI, CAN, LIN, RS-232/422/485/UART, and I²S/LJ/RJ/TDM. The ability to decode up to two 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 MSO3000 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 121.2 ps resolution) around the trigger point for precision measurements. MagniVu is essential for making accurate timing measurements for setup and hold measurements, clock delay, signal skew, and glitch characterization.

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 MSO/DPO3000 Series 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.

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 MSO/DPO3000 Series offers a comprehensive set of integrated analysis tools including waveform- and screen-based cursors, 29 automated measurements, advanced waveform math including arbitrary equation editing, 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, and video design and development is also available.

For extended analysis, National Instrument’s LabVIEW SignalExpress™ Tektronix Edition provides over 200 built-in functions including time and frequency domain analysis, limit testing, data logging, and customizable reports.

Wave Inspector^® Navigation and Search

A 5 Mpoint record length represents thousands of screens of information. The MSO/DPO3000 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, runt, logic, setup and hold, rise/fall time parallel bus, and I²C, SPI, CAN, LIN, RS-232/422/485/UART, and I²S/LJ/RJ/TDM packet content.

Digital Phosphor Technology

The MSO/DPO3000 Series’ 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 MSO/DPO3000 Series, you can choose infinite persistence or variable persistence, determining how long the previous waveform acquisitions stay on-screen. This allows you to determine how often an anomaly is occurring.

Mixed Signal Design and Analysis(MSO Series)

The MSO3000 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 MSO3000 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 MSO3000 Series has color-coded digital traces, displaying ones in green and zeros in blue.

The multiple transition detection hardware of the MSO3000 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 MSO3000 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 MSO3000 Series will capture up to 5 Mpoints at 500 MS/s (2 ns resolution). In addition to the main record, the MSO3000 provides an ultra high-resolution record called MagniVu which acquires 10,000 points at up to 8.25 GS/s (121.2 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.

P6316 MSO Probe

This unique probe design offers two eight-channel pods, simplifying the process of connecting to the device under test. When connecting to square pins, the P6316 can connect directly to 8×2 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 capacitive loading with 101 kΩ input impedance.

Serial Triggering and Analysis (Optional)

On a serial bus, a single signal often includes address, control, data, and clock information. This can make isolating events of interest difficult. The MSO/DPO3000 Series offers a robust set of tools for debugging serial buses with automatic trigger, decode, and search for I²C, SPI, CAN, LIN, RS-232/422/485/UART, and I²S/LJ/RJ/TDM.

Serial Triggering

Trigger on packet content such as start of packet, specific addresses, specific data content, unique identifiers, etc. on popular serial interfaces such as I²C, SPI, CAN, LIN, RS-232/422/485/UART, and I²S/LJ/RJ/TDM.

Bus Display

Provides a higher-level, combined view of the individual signals (clock, data, chip enable, etc.) that make up your bus, making it easy to identify where packets begin and end and identifying subpacket components such as address, data, identifier, CRC, etc.

Bus Decoding

Tired of having to visually inspect the waveform to count clocks, determine if each bit is a 1 or a 0, combine bits into bytes, and determine the hex value? Let the oscilloscope do it for you! Once you’ve set up a bus, the MSO/DPO3000 Series will decode each packet on the bus, and display the value in hex, binary, decimal (LIN only), signed decimal (I²S/LJ/RJ/TDM only), or ASCII (RS-232/422/485/UART only) in the bus waveform.

Event Table

In addition to seeing decoded packet data on the bus waveform itself, you can view all captured packets in a tabular view much like you would see in a software listing. Packets are time stamped and listed consecutively with columns for each component (Address, Data, etc.).

Search

Serial triggering is very useful for isolating the event of interest, but once you’ve captured it and need to analyze the surrounding data, what do you do? In the past, users had to manually scroll through the waveform counting and converting bits and looking for what caused the event. With the MSO/DPO3000 Series, you can have the oscilloscope automatically search through the acquired data for user-defined criteria including serial packet content. Each occurrence is highlighted by a search mark. Rapid navigation between marks is as simple as pressing the Previous (←) and Next (→) buttons on the front panel.

Power Analysis (Optional)

Ever increasing consumer demand for longer battery life devices and for green solutions that consume less power require power-supply designers to characterize and minimize switching losses to improve efficiency. In addition, the supply’s power levels, output purity, and harmonic feedback into the power line must be characterized to comply with national and regional power quality standards. Historically, making these and many other power measurements on an oscilloscope has been a long, manual, and tedious process. The MSO/DPO3000 Series optional power analysis tools greatly simplify these tasks, enabling quick and accurate analysis of power quality, switching loss, harmonics, safe operating area (SOA), modulation, ripple, and slew rate (di/dt, dv/dt). Completely integrated into the oscilloscope, the power analysis tools provide automated, repeatable power measurements with a touch of a button; no external PC or complex software setup is required.

Video Design and Development

Many video engineers have remained loyal to analog oscilloscopes, believing the intensity gradations on an analog display are the only way to see certain video waveform details. The MSO/DPO3000 Series fast waveform capture rate, coupled with its intensity-graded view of the signal, provides the same information-rich display as an analog oscilloscope, but with much more detail and all the benefits of digital scopes.

Standard features such as IRE and mV graticules, holdoff by fields, video polarity, and an Autoset smart enough to detect video signals, make the MSO/DPO3000 Series the easiest to use oscilloscope on the market for video applications. And with up to a 500 MHz bandwidth, four analog inputs, and a built-in 75 ? input termination, the MSO/DPO3000 Series provides ample performance for analog and digital video use.

The MSO/DPO3000 Series video functionality is further extended with the optional DPO3VID video application module. DPO3VID provides the industry's most complete suite of HDTV and custom (nonstandard) video triggers.

Designed to Make Your Work Easier

Large, High-resolution Display

The MSO/DPO3000 Series features a 9 inch (229 mm) widescreen, high-resolution (800 × 480 WVGA) display for seeing intricate signal details.

Dedicated Front-panel Controls

Per-channel vertical controls provide simple and intuitive operation. No longer do you need to share one set of vertical controls across all four channels.

Connectivity

A USB host port on the front panel enables easy transfer of screenshots, instrument settings, and waveform data to a memory stick. The rear panel contains a second USB host port and a USB device port for controlling the oscilloscope remotely from a PC or for connecting a USB keyboard. The USB device port can also be used to print directly to a PictBridge^®-compatible printer. An integrated 10/100 Ethernet port enables easy connection to networks and a Video Out port allows the oscilloscope display to be exported to an external monitor or projector.

Compact Form Factor

A compact, portable form factor allows the MSO/DPO3000 Series to be easily moved between labs and, with a depth of just 5.8 inches (147 mm), it saves you valuable space on your test bench.

TekVPI® Probe Interface

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 comp 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 enables direct attachment of current probes without requiring a separate power supply. TekVPI probes can be controlled remotely through USB, GPIB, or Ethernet, enabling more versatile solutions in ATE environments.

Extended Analysis

Acquiring data and measurements from the MSO/DPO3000 Series is as simple as connecting a USB cable from the oscilloscope to your PC. Key software applications – NI LabVIEW SignalExpress™ Tektronix Edition LE, OpenChoice^® Desktop, and Microsoft Excel and Word toolbars – are included standard with each oscilloscope to enable fast and easy direct communication with your Windows PC.

NI LabVIEW SignalExpress Tektronix Edition LE enables you to instantly acquire, generate, analyze, compare, import, and save measurement data and signals using an intuitive drag-and-drop user interface that does not require any programming. The optional Professional Version offers over 200 built-in functions that provide additional signal processing, advanced analysis, sweeping, limit testing and user-defined step capabilities.

For simple tasks, the included OpenChoice Desktop enables fast and easy communication between the oscilloscope and your PC through USB or LAN for transferring settings, waveforms, and screen images.