Up scope

Test equipment leader Tektronix has introduced a new range of Digital Phosphor Oscilloscopes (DPOs). Dubbed the DPO7000 series, they are based upon new hardware that eliminates the trade-offs between sample rate, record length and waveform capture rate.

"All digital oscilloscopes have had to make difficult design trade-offs to keep pace with the latest technologies," said Colin Shepard, Vice President, Performance Oscilloscopes, Tektronix. "With the real-time DPO7000, Tektronix has eliminated these trades-offs and is able to provide full real-time performance, deep memory, and fast waveform capture rate."

The 500 MHz DPO7054, 1 GHz DPO7104, and 2.5 GHz DPO7254 models share a new generation platform that makes broad use of IBM7HP silicon germanium (SiGe) technology.

The DPO7254 provides sample rates of 10 GS/sec on four channels, with 4X real-time oversampling on four channels simultaneously and up to 16X on one channel, wile the DPO7054 and DPO7104 support 40X oversampling on one channel and 10X on four channels simultaneously. The DPO7054 and DPO7104 support deep record lengths to 200M while the DPO7254 supports 400M.

All models include a 12.1" XGA display enabling engineers to see more information at once, and all models provide vertical accuracy of +/- 1%.

The new models provide fast waveform capture at all sample rates and can acquire more than 250,000 waveforms per second.

They also all include the company's MyScope user interface that enables users to customise the oscilloscope to meet their unique requirements.

DPO7000 models include a so-called Pinpoint trigger system, an A/B triggering system that allows users to discover and capture intermittent faults or events in complex signal structures. The Pinpoint trigger system provides DPO7000 customers with built-in serial pattern triggering up to 1.25 Gb/sec. With this capability, incoming data can be triggered on in real-time without post processing, allowing engineers to catch a fault instead of hoping to find it through repeated searches.

Built-in serial triggers for the I2C, SPI, and RS-232 buses are standard features of the DPO7000 Series. This enables designers to trigger on the events that define key system activities for each of these industry-standard buses.

Signal analysis tools with key measurements for CAN are available options for the DPO7000. These tools enable engineers to perform time correlated system analysis of CAN and LIN , physical layer and data layer analysis with both timing and protocol decode displays, and CAN packet specific triggering.

US list prices for the DPO7000 models begin at $14,000.