Scope upgrades seriously simplify serial-bus debugging

Scope upgrades seriously simplify serial-bus debugging

With debugging of today’s faster and more complex serial-bus standards becoming a major engineering productivity issue, a broad set of oscilloscope firmware and software upgrades aims to simplify and shorten serial-bus debug cycles, significantly easing scope set-up for capture and analysis of the important serial-bus standards, including PCI Express, CAN/LIN, FlexRay, MIL-STD-1553B, and MOST (Media Oriented System Transport). The upgrades — which include Visual Trigger, Mark All Trigger Events, DPOJET crosstalk analysis improvements, and more — add a deep level of intelligence about serial buses to the MSO/DPO 5000. DPO 7000C, and MSO/DSA/DPO 70000C/D Performance Oscilloscope Series, which have maximum bandwidth ranging from 2.5 to 33 Ghz.

Claiming to be the industry’s most flexible trigger system, Visual Trigger lets users create highly customized shapes to intuitively define the areas/conditions of interest for an input waveform, using either a mouse or touchscreen. The capability greatly simplifies scope set-up, so users can be very productive quickly. The Mark All Trigger Events capability ensures capture and search of all potential complex behaviors in a given acquisition of interest.

The improved DPOJET analysis and debug engine better equips user to identify crosstalk in their designs, without having to resort to a bit-error-rate tester (BERT). The DPOJET jitter and eye diagram analysis tool now has an algorithm that correctly identifies crosstalk-induced jitter as bounded uncorrelated jitter (BUJ). This allows real-time scopes to be used for measuring total jitter and separating crosstalk or ISI from other jitter sources. Using Microsoft Visual Studio, libraries can be created to customize measurements in DPOJET, which now includes support for logic signals acquired using the mixed-signal functionality of MSO5000 and MSO70000 series scopes. This logic channel capability allows up to 16 address and command bus signals to be integrated into the DPOJET debug environment.

Also, a custom analysis interface for use with MATLAB lets designers add unique plotting and filter capabilities to their scopes for greater depth of analysis. (Firmware updates: free on Tektronix website; serial-bus-specific applications: $1,950 — available now.)

By Richard Comerford

Tektronix , Beaverton , OR
Information 800-833-9200
http://www.tek.com