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test&measurementZONE Products for the week of December 3, 2007
Amherst Systems Says…
Release of M1 Oscilloscope Tools Showcases Technology for Automatic Detection of Hidden Waveform Anomalies
ASA announce Version 5 of its award-winning M1 Oscilloscope Tools software family. The centerpiece of V5 is a new technology called "Hidden Anomaly Location" or HAL. HAL is an expert system that can find a wide range of waveform flaws that might not be obvious to the user such as signal integrity errors, unexpected changes in waveform parametrics, or behavioral problems in PLLs
Amherst Systems Associates Inc (ASA Corp.) announced Version 5 of its M1 Oscilloscope Tools software family. The centerpiece of version 5 is a new patent-pending technology called "Hidden Anomaly Location", or HAL. HAL is comprised of dozens of independently operating software "agents" which scour each scope acquisition in the background, independent of what the operator is doing, to ascertain the presences of various known "bad things"...waveform anomalies.
When an anomaly is located, an annunciator informs the operator. The operator may then view a screen that indicates the status (running/pass/failed) of all of the agents. Any agents that are showing as "failed" can be queried at the press of a button to display a typically-graphical analysis of the details of that particular failure.
For example, if the period were drifting, a graph of nominal period vs acquisition is shown with a message something like: "The mean for the period on Ch 3 appears to be drifting. A nominal drift of 1.2% over the past 23 acquisitions has been detected."
However, HAL's contribution doesn't end with discovery of a potential anomaly. On each failure analysis screen is a TELL ME MORE button, which takes the user to the page for that particular pathology (e.g. metastability or reflection or non-stationarity or...) in ASA's Waveform Integrity Knowledge Base. The knowledge-base is a wiki-like database of waveform anomalies and pathologies. Each entry will contain a description of at least the following:
- Summary Diagnosis and Suggested Solution Path
- Description
- Presentation - what it looks like
- Causes
- Effects/Impact
- Related pathologies
- Solutions
- Related topics
- Sample files - M1 downloadable waveforms so you can see other examples right inside of M1
"HAL is an expert system that constantly monitors an enormous number of aspects of waveform health, regardless of what brand of scope you're using," according to Mike Williams, ASA's President and Chief Product Designer. "When it finds an issue, HAL doesn't just alert you, it provides an explanation and suggested solutions before you ever leave the bench. This is technology that will revolutionize the way measurement workflow takes place in engineering organizations."
Williams went on to note, "The kind of things HAL is looking for include the kind of things you are just very unlikely to find in normal device or system testing. You might have, for example, low-grade metastability on a single transition across several dozen 20,000-cycle acquisitions. From over 25 years of consulting in clock and timing engineering, that's the kind of issue I've seen change release dates by weeks and months. And it's the kind of thing you never see until very late in the design cycle. But that is exactly the kind of thing HAL is intended to pick up. By finding these issues at the earliest possible stage, you have reduced the impact that the anomaly has to a minimum. One of the usage models we are already seeing interest in is using HAL as a screening tool for waveform health, without making any other specific measurements, or by combining HAL with M1's built-in automation abilities. Either way you get a fast answer and a lot more confidence there aren't things lurking in your signals that your customer might find."
ASA is applying an area of information technology called knowledge-capture and reuse with their Waveform Integrity Knowledge base. Entries in the WIK are authored and edited not only by ASA engineers, but also by engineers in the M1 user community. ASA reviews all submissions prior to their being posted. A number of ASA's most trusted customers have already volunteered to populate entries in the knowledge base.
Additionally, ASA will be partnering with some signal-integrity heavies like Eric Bogatin, of BeTheSignal.com to make their expertise available to the customers by authoring key entries in the WIK.
"Eric and I have been friends since the early 90's", said Mike Williams, "when we traveled around the world together on several occasions, speaking in the old HP High-Speed Symposium. Eric's one of the smartest guys in the field and he can make an especially vexing subject like signal integrity accessible to engineers that don't work in that field everyday."
According to Bogatin, "Having a personal digital assistant sitting on your shoulder and riding shot gun for you when you are focused on debugging your system is a great idea. Even I have a hard time remembering all the possible root causes for effects I see on a scope. With HAL, I'm hoping to leverage the experience of other experts in the field. For example, Mike has worked in the clock distribution field for decades. His, as well as other's contributions to the WaveformKnowledge Base will make that kind of significant experience available to the engineer at the click of a button."
Hidden Anomaly Location is not the first application of embedded intelligence in M1 Oscilloscope Tools. M1's "AutoMeasure" facility automatically deploys an appropriate set of measurements based upon the number and type of signals found, as well as vertically scaling the signals to optimize the accuracy of the digitizers. It also tries to keep an eye on the incoming signals to recognize if the signal setup has changed and, if so, reassign existing measurements to the available channels. The operator is always given the opportunity to decline or accept any and all decisions that result from embedded intelligence, as well as to mute the behavior entirely. Agents in HAL can be muted as needed, both individually and by group.
ASA has dedicated a design sub-team to extending and refining HAL. "There are a large number of fascinating new arenas to explore with the HAL technology," according to Tom Zych, ASA's Chief Engineer. "Over the next several releases, you can expect to see significant expansion of what HAL can do and how it does it that go far beyond what we're announcing today.
Making HAL a stronger contributor to M1's collaboration value proposition will definitely be a part of that." Hidden Anomaly Location joins a large number of other powerful capabilities included in M1 Oscilloscope Tools at no additional charge... like measurement work-flow automation, built-in compliance tests, an Rj/Dj capability that employs neural networks to calibrate error and instrument noise out of the results, and numerous productivity and collaboration tools.
"Virtually any other company would have made HAL a stand-alone product and charged customers to the moon for it", said Williams, "and actually, they'd pay it because HAL would pay for itself the first time it found something. However,ASA is committed to a product strategy of including 100% of our innovation in the product... no options. HAL is no different... it's in the product and ready to start tracking down subtle and hidden waveform problems now."
Other changes out in version five include further optimization of the user-interface and additions to the exploratory tools to further speed up moving through waveform space, as well as the addition of a chess game. "When M1 is churning away doing all the work, life at the bench can get a little dull. We wanted you to be able to keep yourself entertained. For somereason, chess seemed like a logical choice", said Mike Williams.
EN-Genius Says…
Remember when driving an oscilloscope demanded little more than setting the scope's trigger for the anticipated signal? You set the vertical input for the amplitude of the expected signal, and tweaked the timebase and trigger knobs to get a stable and measurable display. For the most part, those unsophisticated days are gone forever, replaced by today's multi-channel digital scopes that gather immense amounts of data as they acquire signals (usually from high-speed serial data streams).
Converting loaded data into meaningful information is what Amherst Systems Associates' Hidden Anomaly Location embedded intelligence is all about. HAL can automatically uncover a single metastable edge across hundreds of acquisitions, or zero in on things such as ringing or frequency drift, immediately calling your attention to the glitch or abnormal condition.
As software goes, HAL Version 5 comes from a small but first-rate company, and it's undoubtedly well crafted. Of course, only protracted use will determine its true value to a user, and whether it's bug free. But, as you might gather from reading the company's thorough press statement (above), ASA is a company with a proven track record, and a lightning-rod focus on clock and timing.
Multi-Platform Independence
ASA patented wares for analyzing jitter and timing, in both clock and data streams, are instantiated in this M1 product. Significantly, M1 plays on almost every current lab scope, whether it's from Agilent Technologies, LeCroy, Tektronix, or Yokogawa. HAL’s more than 250 built-in lab-validated measurement capabilities are impressive, letting you (or it) locate subtle, but potentially serious, anomalies that relate to occurrences of metastability, transition faults, and mismatch reflections. If that doesn't cover your needs, you can use the product framework to add your own measurement profiles, or by using The Mathworks popular Matlab package.
What's more, as ASA points out in its nifty on-line animated presentation, you could easily break the bank loading jitter analyzer and trigger scan wares to one of today's mid- to high-end oscilloscopes. Auxiliary software installed in a typical digital scope can add tens of thousands of dollars to its cost. In contrast, ASA software is priced from about $1000 to not more than about $8000.
A Common Format
Not mentioned in the ASA release is that M1 OT (Oscilloscope Tools) give you a common format for waveform data. Thanks to that, the company PC-hosted M1 Reader can actually let you analyze data when you're away from your favorite instrument on the bench.
M1 Reader does everything that M1 OT does, as far as analysis goes, but it can't collect data from an actual oscilloscope. So, what does it do?
Well, for many observations, a realtime scope can deliver far too much information. That's where the M1 OT shines. It can assist in sorting through the data sets, using a Record/Playback feature.
With M1 OT itself, you have to be in front of your scope when you're probing; obviously, nobody else can directly use the instrument at that moment. M1 Reader sidesteps that problem. It essentially provides multiple-seat post-acquisition analysis, freeing up a single expensive scope so others can use it to gather signal data.
Yes, you have to save data from M1 OT running on your scope. But, the M1 Reader is a low cost product. That means every engineer in an enterprise could have a copy, essentially establishing a multi-licensed M1. You buy one copy of M1 OT that resides on your scope hardware, and then use as many M1 Readers as required for off-line analysis.
Sometimes, a system's events happen occasionally, and long periods of time can elapse between them. It's not unusual for some projects to run sessions overnight. But, problems often arise because most oscilloscopes only save their most recent acquisition. You have to trigger the scope in a one-shot mode and hope that you'll find the right glitch or condition. How do you get around that?
Post-Analyze Stored Data
It's easy with M1, as you don't have to know what to trigger on. The Record/Playback feature lets you take a series of acquisitions, storing them in a shared directory. With that, you can then post-analyze the large amount of stored data.
You can also run an analysis off-line with M1 Reader on a PC that's networked with the same shared drive where you recorded all of the scope's acquisitions. The only limitations are that M1 Reader can only read the data saved by an M1 OT product, and it can't read saved data files from older versions of M1.
As the press release extols, the Hidden Anomaly Location function of M1 OT v5 is key. If there are no signal problems, you probably won't even know that HAL is lurking in the background. But, if a measurement encounters some sort of problem, HAL will likely step in and report it.
HAL leverages all of the M1 OT's hundreds of built-in measurements, multiple measurement domains, and analysis features to automatically detect any of dozens of waveform anomalies. Once it finds one, HAL then gives you lots of details on what it found. The software can report the location within an acquisition (no mean feat for a long dataset) and the degree to which the anomaly is present.
A Wikipedia-Like Database
This analysis could, nonetheless, still reveal more information than you might be able to comfortably process. As such, the screen or screens that present the details of each anomaly include buttons that take you to entries in the WIK that describes possible causes for a detected anomaly. You can also add to, and refine, this Wikipedia-like database, and grow it to fit your application.
The multiple so-called agents mentioned in the ASA press release seek the problems. These agents belong to groups, such as Voltage or Clock. In operation, you can enable or disable individual agents, or groups of agents (or all of them). Although the v5 release contains quite a collection of agents, ASA says it will add more over time as they're developed. You can also create your own agents.
Opening a display window and clicking on a Details button for the agent that noticed the problem can reveal details on what HAL agents may have picked up. That dishes up a message describing the anomaly in detail, along with an annotated graphical view of the relevant data. Some agents also follow trends that develop over multiple acquisitions. Others look at the information within single acquisitions.
There are myriad features of M1 OT and HAL (too many to discuss here), but suffice it to say that running this intelligent software on your scope will be like having a skilled technical consultant looking over your shoulder.
Lastly, ASA offers an M1 Software Subscription Agreement for users. SSA automatically delivers new versions of M1 to subscribers, usually within days of release. SSA ensures rapid access to bug fixes, upgrades, and enhancements.
Version 5 of M1 OT will be in production by December 2007 with –step pricing determined by the scope to which you will attach it in a range from $995 to $7995.
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