R&S unveils ASIC-based zone triggering for scopes

Rohde & Schwarz has claimed the industry’s first ASIC-based zone triggering, implemented in its new MXO series oscilloscopes. The MXO zone trigger implementation is faster than traditional triggers by several orders of magnitude, claiming the fastest zone trigger update rate of 600,000 waveforms per second. This new implementation enables oscilloscopes to precisely isolate events previously difficult or impossible to detect with traditional triggers.

The ASIC-based zone triggering solution also claims less than 1.45-µs blind time between trigger events and speeds of up to 10,000× faster than competitive zone triggering offerings.

Typically, oscilloscope trigger types can be difficult to set up and/or inadequately visualize specific trigger events. Zone triggering enables users to specify trigger conditions by drawing one or more zone areas on the instrument’s display, R&S said, after which the oscilloscope inspects each acquisition for these conditions. It shows the acquisitions on the display for events that only meet the graphical conditions.

The new zone triggering is the industry’s first ASIC-based solution that works on analog channel signals, math and spectrum, R&S said, and is effective on non-monotonic edges, serial bus patterns, math waveforms, events across multiple channels and events in the frequency domain, where traditional triggers do not work.

Zone triggering for a specific RF chirp length in the time domain and chirp exceeding a certain power level in the frequency domain. (Source: Rohde & Schwarz)

MXO zone triggering also delivers the ability to exclusively store waveforms in real time that match trigger criteria, which was not available until now, R&S said. Users can exclusively focus on specific events relevant to their application.

When zone triggering is combined with the MXO’s free run mode, also new to the industry, where the oscilloscope captures as fast as possible without looking for an edge trigger event, it “can be very effective for power integrity measurements and electromagnetic interference debug,” according to the company.

The ASIC-based zone triggering functionality is standard for all MXO 4 , MXO 5 and MXO 5C series oscilloscopes, beginning with version 2.2 firmware. The firmware is a free web download and existing MXO users can update their instruments for free.