Unabashed promotion is nothing new. Trade shows and advertisements abound with freebie samples, but few companies really give away anything of great substance. Yes, you can score an evaluation or development kit occasionally or grab some free technical notes. You might be lucky enough to sample some limited-usage software, or glom an occasional chip or two, but real utility remains elusive until you dig deep.
It was with a measure of surprise then, that I learned about an intriguing announcement from Amherst Systems Associates, a Massachusetts-based test-and-measurement company that focuses on clock and timing engineering. ASA will be giving away a copy of its very useful M1 Oscilloscope Tools (Standard Edition) to every attendee that stops by booth 733 at DesignCon 2009 in Santa Clara, California, at the Convention Center. We reviewed this fabulous product when it debuted in December of 2007.
A Meltdown Gesture
As company president Mike Williams points out, this is offer is potentially in excess of 5000 licenses. "This is the 15th DesignCon I'm attending," says Williams, "and it's happening in the midst of an industry meltdown. Look, everyone needs tools to get more done at a lower cost, so giving a copy of our product to every attendee seems like the perfect gesture for this year's show."
Qualifying attendees who visits the ASA booth between 12:30 PM and 6:30 PM on February 3rd and February 4th will be provided with a no-cost license to M1 OT. That's a $5,995 value. After the first 100 free licenses every day, an unlimited number of additional visitors will be able to obtain a license for a mere $14, a fee that covers the costs of security licensing.
Indefinite Extensions
The licenses that will be dished out to DesignCon attendees will operate until July 1st, 2009, but that can be extended to an indefinite period – at no cost – at any time before that date. If that isn't a good enough deal, ASA says DesignCon show goers will also be given the opportunity to upgrade M1OT Standard Edition licenses to full M1OT Ultimate Edition licenses at a whopping 50% discount.
"I only wish I could provide a free license to more than the first 200 folks," says Williams, "but my company does incur costs in generating them. We do, however, feel very good about providing a product that more than competes with software portfolios from oscilloscope vendors that cost as much as $124,000."
ASA's patented approach to analyzing jitter and timing in both clock and data-streams is instantiated in the M1 product family, which has become a de facto standard for how precision timing is measured. The Standard Edition of M1 Oscilloscope Tools is a reduced functional version of the ASA M1OT Ultimate Edition.
Nonetheless, M1OT-Standard is nothing to sneeze at. It offers a very wide range of analysis capabilities, and can do almost everything that an oscilloscope's more expensive native software portfolio can do. For example, M1OT Standard edition can do compliance testing for a range of signal classes, such as PCI Express Gen 2, or DDR2/3. It can also handle jitter/timing analysis, serial-data analysis, and deliver eye-diagrams on all major manufacturer's oscilloscopes.
Nonetheless Powerful
Admittedly, ASA’s M1 OT Standard doesn't have most of the capabilities built into the company’s Ultimate edition, but it still shapes up as a very powerful addition to any modern scope. The Ultimate Edition gives you HAL (Hidden Anomaly Location), so-called collaboration support, waveform Send/Receive (handles archiving and transmission of waveforms), and the company's Advanced Exploration Interface and Isolated Sub-Population Analysis toolset. If you want to see what this is all about, the differences between ASA's Standard and its Ultimate edition of M1OT are explained on the company's web site.
Have you made plans to attend DesignCon 2009? If not, ASA’s offer may very well justify the T&E expenditure to get there.
