Tektronix, Inc. has released its new 6 Series B mixed signal oscilloscope (MSO) that extends the performance of its mainstream scope portfolio to 10 GHz and 50 GS/s sample rates. The 6 Series B MSO delivers an improved combination of bandwidth, sample rate, vertical resolution, low noise, and high effective number of bits (ENOB) for a range of applications in semiconductors, power integrity, automotive, defense, aerospace, and research.
Aimed at higher speed embedded designs across industries such as industrial, medical, consumer electronics, and computers, the new scope meets embedded requirements for mixed-signal design troubleshooting and serial bus speeds. The enhanced 6 Series B MSO delivers several features that enable users to analyze and debug embedded systems, including high signal fidelity with 12-bit ADCs, very low noise, 10-GHz bandwidth, and up to eight FlexChannel inputs.
For greater flexibility, each FlexChannel input can be used as a single analog channel, converted into eight digital channels using a TLP058 logic probe, or simultaneous analog and spectrum views with independent acquisition controls for each domain. For the digital signals, the configuration can be changed at any time by adding or removing the logic probes.
The 6 Series B comes with three industry firsts, including the first oscilloscope with bandwidth more than 2-GHz to offer four, six, or eight channel models, said Mark Briscoe, product marketing manager, mainstream oscilloscopes, Tektronix.
The new scope offers industry-leading noise performance, cutting down noise by more than 75% compared to the 5 Series MSO, he said. “Now that alone is impressive but we’ve also added to the B model a new 50 GS/s interleaved on two channels that provides about an additional 2 dB of noise improvement. That’s about 20% at many settings.”
“With more channels, more bandwidth, and less noise you can see how the 6 Series B is really a game-changer for engineers,” said Briscoe.
In addition, almost everything on this family of oscilloscopes is upgradable in the field, he added.
Embedded trends
There are several technology trends that are driving the adoption of these tools, said Chris Witt, vice president and general manager at Tektronix. “We’re seeing most embedded systems incorporating sensors like video and 3D sensing that produce huge amounts of data. This is driving higher speed buses to move all this data around in faster processers and SoCs to synthesize it.
“In addition, power systems have evolved for efficiency, but also to deliver higher currents that precisely maintain voltages on dozens or more of different power rails in these systems,” he added. “These systems are densely packed, making noise and coupling a real challenge. Clearly, engineers need higher performance test equipment to keep pace.”
Briscoe said the new 6 Series can help address faster and more buses with strict signal integrity requirements in today’s designs that depend on fast, reliable data transfers. “You can add decoding for more than 20 serial protocols, covering a wide range of industries and applications. Setting up a serial bus generally involves identifying the signals and setting the voltage thresholds.
“The bus display shows the start frame, address, data and any error conditions, especially for higher speed standards to help make sure the buses meet industry standards,” he continued. “Test automation software can walk you through connections, handle instrument control, compare measurements to the standard, and generate comprehensive reports.”
In addition, automated compliance testing solutions are available for many common industry standards. “Every 6 Series comes with TIE [time interval error] measurements and phase noise measurements,” said Briscoe. “The advanced jitter analysis option includes a super-quick jitter summary to quantify jitter on important clocks and data lines. It provides additional tools to help users take jitter apart and determine its sources.”
Here’s the 6 Series B in action.
Key features
Users have better signal visibility with the up to 10-GHz of “fully-upgradable” bandwidth and up to 50 GS/S sample rates. Claiming leading signal fidelity, the oscilloscope contributes less than 51.1 µV of noise at 1 mV/div and 1 GHz, and less than 1.39 mV of noise at 50 mV/div and 10 GHz. The better noise performance is thanks to the 6 Series’ new front-end ASIC, the TEK061.
The 6 Series B MSO offers a range of options to streamline protocol decoding, compliance testing for serial standards, jitter analysis, and power analysis. Built-in digital down converters (DDCs) behind every channel enable multi-channel spectrum analysis, and spectrum measurements are synchronized with time domain waveforms to enable correlation between RF and time events.
Spectrum analysis on the 6 Series B is much more capable than a typical scope FFT [Fast Fourier Transform], he said. “It offers many of the benefits of a spectrum analyzer but with some key advantages over those, too.”
Unlike typical scope FFT controls, the spectrum controls and the time domain controls are completely independent DDCs, independent of time domain sampling, and enables users to look at spectrums on more than one channel, Briscoe added. “This lets you change the sampling rate and get better time resolution without affecting the spectrum at all.”
For the user interface, the 6 Series B MSO offers a 15.6-inch HD capacitive pinch-zoom-swipe touch display for an intuitive drag and drop, object-oriented interface. It also offers an easy to use TekVPI probe interface that simplifies setup and reduces errors. One example is the new TDP7710 TriMode Probe with 10-GHz bandwidth, introduced to match the 6 Series improvements, and the ability to switch from making differential to common mode to single-ended measurements, without having to reconnect the probe.
In addition, the 6 Series B is the first 10-GHz oscilloscope that is capable of switching between Windows 10 and closed operating systems without loss of performance or ease-of-use.
Tektronix has learned a lot while working with customers since the launch of its first MDO 4000 product with a dedicated RF spectrum analyzer in 2011, said Briscoe. What’s the best and most useful set of features to help them do their jobs and in this world of IoT where you have RF, analog, and digital, all coming together, he added.
“When we built the TEK061 for our next-generation product, we wanted to enhance the RF measurement capabilities on our mainstream oscilloscope platforms, and we did that by building a lot of different capabilities, including a digital down converter that’s done in hardware, in the ASIC,” he said.
This resulted in several new improvements.
“We can have Spectrum View on each input channel, so now you can do multi-channel RF applications,” said Briscoe. “So things like looking at antenna arrays where you have multiple inputs coming into the oscilloscope you can measure all of those at the same time. You can’t do that on the spectrum analyzer; you have to do it one at a time.
“The second thing we found super convenient for customers – and this is a tremendous pain for people that are using traditional oscilloscope FFTs – is that you generally can’t have the view you want in the frequency domain and the view you want in the time domain.”
With the 6 Series B and any Tektronix product with Spectrum View, both the frequency domain display and time domain display can be set up separately. “Now you can look at that coordination between the two, and the correlation of what’s happening in the time domain and the RF domain at the same time in the view you want using separate controls.”
This speeds up the debug process considerably because users don’t have to keep going back and forth and resetting the instrument, said Briscoe. “They can just set it up once the way they want both domains and then get that correlation using what we call Spectrum Time. So, it’s actually the amount of time on the time domain waveform where the spectrum is being calculated.”
This multi-domain, multi-channel view is an extraordinary capability of this instrument, Briscoe said.
Tektronix also offers tools to enable remote operation. With e*Scope a user can remotely view and control the scope over a network connection via a standard web browser. The TekScope PC analysis software runs on a Windows computer with the same user experience as the 4, 5, and 6 Series MSOs.
“We know remote work has been critical to engineers this year to stay productive during a pandemic,” said Briscoe. “At Tektronix we believe having that flexibility to work from home or anywhere really is not only valuable right now, it’s valuable long term as part of doing regular business. So to help engineers continue to test and measure with our top of the line tools we have e*Scope and TekScope available.”
With e*Scope users can view the scope’s entire user interface in a browser window, share live data of waveforms and analysis across teams wherever they are, and even control the scope remotely through the web browser, Briscoe said.
The TekScope software is effectively the same software that’s running on the 6 Series B MSO, but running on a PC where the user can combine data from multiple sources, and view and analyze data offline or connected live to one or two scopes, he added.
The 6 Series B MSO is now available worldwide. Pricing starts at $26,500.00 U.S. MSRP. The oscilloscope and included probes (one TPP1000 1-GHz voltage probe per channel) come with Tektronix’s one-year warranty.
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