test&measurementZONE Products for the week of September 26, 2005

Agilent Technologies Says . . .
Agilent Technologies Introduces Industry's Highest-Performance 100-MHz Oscilloscopes
Real-Time Display Update Rate, Up to 40 Times Faster Than Competing Models, Now Shows Critical Events in Complex Waveforms

Agilent Technologies Inc. has introduced four 100-MHz portable digital storage and mixed-signal oscilloscopes (DSOs/MSOs) with the highest-performance capabilities in the industry. With a real-time sample rate of 2 Gsamples/s on each channel and a display update rate up to 40 times faster than competing models, the Agilent 6000 series can now show critical events in complex waveforms, dramatically reducing design verification and debug time.

These additions to the 6000 Series also provide the industry with its first 4+16-channel MSO in the 100-MHz segment. These oscilloscopes feature industry-leading waveform viewing and measurement insight for 8- and 16-bit embedded system designers in the aerospace/defense, automotive, communications and consumer electronics industries.

Exceptional waveform viewing is achieved with Agilent's MegaZoom III display technology. MegaZoom III provides users with real-time, high-resolution XGA waveform viewing with 256 levels of color-intensity grades and memory depth up to a full 8 Mpoints-800 times more than competing models. The dynamic range in the Z-axis provides the highest waveform-display quality of any other portable oscilloscopes on the market today.

Engineers face design problems that are increasingly digital in nature -- more and faster signals, wider time spans and serial triggering. Agilent's portable 6000 series oscilloscopes provide the performance needed to address these measurement challenges. They are optimized for waveform update rates and display resolution, plus have the ability to add 16 logic-timing channels, significantly reducing debugging time.

"The new 100-MHz models bring industry-leading performance technology to those working on MCU- and FPGA-based designs at a price that fits their budget," said Dan Oldfield, R&D manager at Agilent's Design Validation Division. "Customers designing products based on 8- and 16-bit MCUs and FPGAs will now be able to get the exceptional performance of the 6000 series oscilloscopes previously available only in the higher-performance, more expensive oscilloscope models. With MegaZoom III, users now have a scope that can trigger, capture and display the critical events in complex signals inside their systems."

As the complexity of embedded systems increases, hardware developers often need to isolate events of interest or view critical relationships on more than the limited number of channels available in traditional oscilloscopes. MSOs provide the seamless integration of scope and logic-timing channels for time-aligned viewing and triggering across any or all input channels. Now, for the first time, customers can order either a 2+16 or 4+16 channel MSO for their 100-MHz applications. Those who order a DSO 6000 series can easily upgrade to an MSO configuration later.

Additionally, Agilent's FPGA dynamic probe, introduced for Agilent logic analyzers in 2004, is fully supported by the MSO versions of the Agilent 6000 oscilloscopes. With the addition of the FPGA dynamic probe, embedded systems developers using Xilinx FPGAs in their hardware digital designs have the ability to see inside their FPGA and correlate this internal view with events on their system with the MSO's scope and logic channels.

All Agilent 6000 Series oscilloscopes come standard with LAN, GPIB and USB interfaces as well as an additional front-panel USB port to replace limited-capacity floppy drives. The front-panel USB port lets designers easily store memory records, and screen images and settings on standard higher-speed, higher-capacity USB memory sticks.

EN-Genius Says...

Having a standalone instrument that can provide all this performance in one portable box is great, if you're willing to pay the price of several thousand dollars. Today, alternative measurement PC-based measurement techniques are available at a much lower cost using digitizer cards at a much lower price. Let's compare it to an alternative measurement approach, a PC-based digitizer card.

Essentially, a digitizer card and a DSO are waveform measurement instruments that contain an ADC. The major difference is their form factor. One (the DSO) comes housed in one package, while the other (the digitizer card) comes on a plug-in PC card. The DSO is essentially a closed system while the digitizer card affords its user flexibility of installing additional hardware. To be fair DSOs like the 6000 series are Windows based, and provide the fastest possible refresh rates that even the best digitizers cards cannot do. Another big DSO advantage is in its much wider bandwidth and sampling rates, attributes made possible by a DSO's built-in proprietary high-speed ADC technology and specialized probes that allow voltage and frequency measurements over much wider ranges than even the best PC-based digitizer cards. But then again, look at the price differences: thousands of dollars for a standalone DSO versus hundreds of dollars for a digitizer card. So for certain specific applications, a digitizer card may very well be more cost effective.

The Agilent 6000 series oscilloscopes are available now at the following prices:

Memory upgrades start at $500. A customer-installable DSO-to-MSO upgrade kit is priced at $2,000.

Data Sheet