Tektronix Unveils Firmware for its Oscilloscopes to Enhance Performance Speeds

Tektronix, Inc., providing test, measurement and monitoring instrumentation announced the release of firmware for the DPO7000, DPO/DSA700000 and DPO/DSA70000B Series oscilloscopes which provide 20 times more throughput in all measurements and applications which use finite impulse response (FIR) filters.

 

Maximum advantage can be realized when processing long record length waveforms with FIR filtering required in high-speed serial data analysis applications. The high-speed serial data standards used at present makes it necessary for test instruments to incorporate both performance and analysis capabilities.

 

The company offers DPO/DSA70000B Series oscilloscopes which ensure high signal fidelity, with optimum jitter-noise floor, good noise performance, flat frequency response and scalable performance up to 20 GHz. Such features are required for testing high-speed third generation serial bus architectures said the company.

 

As resources are not in abundance it becomes necessary for instruments to help designers perform measurements rapidly and efficiently. The new Tektronix (News - Alert) firmware enables speedy performance of such crucial measurements.

 

“As the industry’s oscilloscope leader, we are committed to continually improving our products for the benefit of current and future customers to ensure they can rely on Tektronix for the most reliable and widest range of test and measurement equipment available,” said Brian Reich, vice president, Performance Oscilloscopes, Tektronix.

 

“The new firmware delivers an enormous performance gain that will increase designers’ productivity even as serial data test requirements continue to increase in complexity,” he added.

 

The new firmware further improves the performance of application packages like Jitter Analysis, HDMI and Ethernet compliance testing besides others. The improvement offered matches filter settings and the length of waveforms to be processed. The time to apply the filter in the Serial Data Link Analysis (SDLA) application for a 20M record length was completed in just three seconds and not one minute as it normally takes.

 

The DPO/DSA70000B Series oscilloscopes allow debugging of serial data signals up to 12Gbps on all channels simultaneously owing to its bandwidth. It is suited well for multi-lane applications like PCI-Express 3, SATA 6 Gbps, SuperSpeed USB, HDMI, DisplayPort and Ethernet. The FastAcq acquisition mode offers a capture rate more than 300,000 waveforms per second which delivers insight into signal behavior enabling in-depth analysis.

The DPO7000 Series oscilloscopes ensure signal fidelity, triggering, protocol decode and search capabilities required for debugging, characterizing and analyzing 1st generation serial data, RF, memory and general purpose devices. Models range from 500 MHz to 3.5 GHz and its waveform acquisition is capable of detecting complex signal characteristics.