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test&measurementZONE Products for the week of March 3, 2008
Agilent Says…
Oscilloscopes with Industry's Biggest Display, Fastest Waveform Update Rate
Ten New Models Offer Best Signal Visibility at Low Cost, Most Comprehensive Suite of Insightful Software Applications
Agilent Technologies Inc. expanded its mixed-signal and digital-storage oscilloscope portfolio with 10 new models that comprise its next-generation InfiniiVision 7000 Series. The new Agilent InfiniiVision 7000 Series offers bandwidths up to 1 GHz and delivers an unparalleled deep memory waveform update rate of up to 100,000 waveforms per second. Each model, equipped with the industry's largest display – a 12.1-inch XGA LCD display – comes in a package that is just 7 inches deep and weighs only 14 pounds.
Electronic design and test teams in nearly every electronic industry, including computer, communications, semiconductor, aerospace/defense, automotive and wireless industries, continue to produce increasingly sophisticated hardware designs. Designers use oscilloscopes as the primary tool to test and debug those designs. Confidently and consistently viewing subtle signal details and infrequent events enables teams to more quickly debug and test their electronic systems. Agilent's InfiniiVision 7000 Series oscilloscopes deliver the best signal visibility for designs that include analog and/or digital and serial signals.
"We use scopes extensively during product development," said Ken Chalfant, laser manufacturing engineer, Spectranetics Corp. "Our Agilent InfiniiVision scope enables my team to quickly find problems like no other scope on the market." Spectranetics is a leader in excimer laser systems used in minimally invasive surgical procedures and is a current InfiniiVision scope user.
Benefits of the Agilent InfiniiVision 7000 Series oscilloscopes include:
- Biggest display: All InfiniiVision 7000 Series models are equipped with biggest-in-class 12.1 inch display – nearly 40 percent more display area than any other on the market. Larger displays have become increasingly important as general purpose scopes need more space to display digital and serial signals in addition to traditional scope channels. The increased display size helps users who need to display up to 20 channels simultaneously with serial protocol.
- Fastest update rate: InfiniiVision Series 7000 models provide the industry's fastest update rate – up to 100,000 waveforms per second – eliminating two common errors that can cause engineers to miss critical information: unresponsive controls with deep memory turned on, and traditional architectures that are blind to changes in signals being tested. For designs with both digital and analog signal measurements, the update rate is 5,000 times faster than any other available scope. This allows the user to view critical signal detail that competitive scopes miss with their longer dead times.
- Most comprehensive suite of applications: Packed with numerous general purpose features, InfiniiVision 7000 Series oscilloscopes can be customized with a number of unique software options. Supported applications give engineers meaningful insight into application-specific problems.
Applications include:
- serial decode and trigger for I2C, SPI, CAN, LIN, FlexRay, RS-232 and other UART;
- rapid core-assisted debug of designs with Xilinx or Altera FPGAs;
- segmented memory for analysis of laser pulses, radar bursts and serial packets;
- offline PC viewing and sharing of previously acquired scope data; and
- RF contextual viewing of scope data using Vector Signal Analysis software.
"Agilent has been the fastest-growing scope vendor each year for the past five years," said Jay Alexander, vice president and general manager of Agilent's oscilloscopes business. "The InfiniiVision 7000 Series is a good indication of why, and capitalizes on our 10 years of leadership developing MSOs. We focused on delivering on customers' inputs for an envious form factor, coupled with an architecture that delivers the best signal visibility at an affordable cost."
EN-Genius Says…
Agilent's mid-range InfiniiVision 7000 Series oscilloscopes are impressive, but it looks like the company's marketing folks may have gotten a bit carried away with the wording of the press announcement. In its press release each model is claimed to be equipped with "the industry's largest display...that's nearly 40% more display area than any other on the market."
While that may be technically true, and correct for mixed-signal scopes, Agilent competitor Tektronix has had digital oscilloscopes with 12.1-inch XGA LCDs in its DPO7000 Series for a few years now. Arguably, Tek DPO7000 scopes are also equipped with the "industry's largest" displays.
Agilent's press release also claims its latest scopes offer "unparalleled deep memory waveform update rate of up to 100,000 waveforms per second." While that's nothing to sneeze at, Tek's fourth-generation DPX signal imaging system can acquire 250,000 waveform/s. Surely there's a parallel there, even if you consider specsmanship.
Tek DPO7054 and DPO7104 models, providing 40x over-sampling on one channel, and 10x over-sampling on four channels simultaneously (when configured with an option) can also store record lengths of 200 Mpoint. The Tek DPO7254 provides 400 Mpoint of memory. To be fair, Agilent can lay claim to scopes that probe both digital and analog signals, where update rates are faster than challengers from Tek.
How Much?
Agilent may have a leg up on Tektronix with respect to cost effectiveness, though. A 500-MHz Tek DPO7054, for example, is base-priced at about $14,000. A 1-GHz Tektronix DPO7104 comes in at base price of about $18,000, and a 2.5-GHz top-end DPO7254 is priced at about $26,000.
 By comparison, Agilent's scopes start at about $6900 for a 350-MHz DSO7032A, which is a digital storage-scope only. Prices ascend to about $9300 for a digital-only scope, and to about $14,500 for a 500-MHz mixed-signal version. A 1-GHz Agilent DSO7104A 4-channel digital storage scope is priced at less than $14,000, with a mixed-signal MSO7104A coming in at less than about $18,000. An MSO7104A can include 16 logic channels.
Update Rates and Dead Time
Agilent points out that while bandwidth, sample rate, and memory depth are essential specs to consider, an equally important characteristic is a scope's update rate: how many waveform/s (acquisition/s) a scope can acquire, process, and, most importantly, display.
So-called dead-time is the time it takes for a scope to process and then display an acquired waveform before re-arming its trigger for another acquisition. Agilent notes that for many competing scopes, this time is often orders of magnitude greater than acquisition time on fast time/div horizontal settings. The argument is made that a glitch won't be captured if it occurs during a scope's dead-time processing period.
Obviously, the key to improving the probability of capturing a signal anomaly during scope acquisition time is to minimize dead-time. If you rotate the timebase control, you expect the oscilloscope to respond immediately, not seconds later after the scope finishes processing data. Update rates directly affect a scope's probability of capturing and displaying infrequent and random events. Slow update rates will cause a scope to miss subtle or infrequent signal details. Capturing random and infrequent events on a scope is all about statistical probability. The key to improving the probability of capturing an anomaly on a signal is to minimize dead-time, taking more pictures of a signal in a given timeframe, which these scopes do.
 Regardless of tradeoffs, real or imagined, Agilent's latest scopes look good. From an operational point of view, the 7000 Series oscilloscopes provide 256 levels of intensity, a feature that can help reveal subtle analog characteristics. The company MegaZoom III deep memory can also capture long non-repeating signals while maintaining a high sample-rate. MegaZoom III lets you zoom in on a signal's area of interest.
As mixed-signal scopes, Agilent's InfiniiVision 7000 Series's display size can let you view up to 20 channels simultaneously, with 8-bit vertical resolution. You can also capture analog and digital signals on multiple channels, and an Autoscale feature can let you display any analog or digital signal, automatically setting the scope vertical, horizontal, and trigger controls for the best display. Autoscale also transparently optimizes the scope's memory.
High-Resolution Vertical Mode
A high-res mode also provides up to 12 bits of vertical resolution in a realtime single-shot mode. This is handled internally by serially-filtering sequential data points and then mapping the filtered results to the display. This mode only operates at timebase settings greater than 10 µs/div. You can also use a peak-detect feature to find narrow glitches. It will find glitches as short as 500 ps on 350-MHz models, and 250 ps on 500-MHz and 1-GHz models.
Analog and Digital Compared
The big LCDs will let you compare multiple cycles of TTL/CMOS/ECL digital signals with analog signals, too, and you can use the scope timing channels to reveal signal relationships. For example, you could capture and view digital data on buses (up to 16 bits wide), and trigger on and display individual signals or bus waveforms, and show the results in hexadecimal format or as binary. Mixed-signal triggering lets you trigger across any combo of analog and digital signals simultaneously, so you can view and measure analog signals that are timed with corresponding digital signals.
As mentioned in the press release, in the 4-channel versions you can also acquire and decode serial bus signals. Serial bus triggering and decoding can assist if you're trying to validate serial bus activity in realtime.
Something not mentioned in Agilent's press release is built-in waveform processing. Software stored in Flash lets you subtract, multiply, integrate, do square root, and differentiate on waveforms, as well as run Hanning, flattop, and rectangular-window FFTs (fast Fourier transforms) for spectral analysis. Software can also be upgraded at the Agilent Web site, transferring through USB (Universal Serial Bus) or 10/100Base-T LAN connections, both of which are built-in.
One of the press statement bullets refers briefly to offline PC viewing and sharing of acquired scope data. Note that this application, dubbed IntuiLink, is a freebie that comes these scopes. IntuiLink PC software lets you transfer waveform data or a screen image to your PC. IntuiLink Web viewer, used with a LAN or even across the Internet, also lets you drive and view one of these scopes remotely.
LXI Omission
Lastly, Agilent totally forgot to mention in its press statement that its latest scopes are all LXI (LAN eXtensions for Instrumentation (LXI) Class C instruments. As such, they adhere to LAN protocols and LXI requirements, and include built-in Web control servers and IVI-COM drivers, and respond to SCPI (Standard Commands for Programmable Instrumentation) commands. National Instruments LabVIEW plug-and-play and IVI-C drivers also support these scopes.
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