All-in-One Debug Tool for Embedded Systems Design

BEAVERTON, Ore.—Tektronix, Inc., a leading worldwide provider of test, measurement and monitoring instrumentation, announced the availability of the MSO4000 Mixed Signal Oscilloscopes (MSO). The new MSO4000 family of mixed signal oscilloscopes combine three powerful capabilities—an advanced real-time oscilloscope and logic analyzer, and the breakthrough Wave Inspector waveform search engine—into one small and lightweight portable device for embedded design and debug. The MSO4000 provides a familiar oscilloscope front-panel and a stunning display, letting the engineer control everything intuitively but with only a fraction of the size and weight of other MSOs. It ushers in a new benchmark for performance and usability, providing uncompromised debug functionality that raises the bar for mixed signal oscilloscopes to its highest level yet.

Embedded systems are literally everywhere. Examples include cellular phones, automotive systems, avionics, network devices, industrial controls, and consumer electronics. Debugging an embedded design often requires viewing analog signal phenomena and the interaction of digital control signals. In this mixed signal environment, engineers cannot accurately predict the types of problems that will be uncovered during development. They need a test instrument with the ability to acquire both analog and digital signals and display them time-correlated on a single display. The new Tektronix MSO4000 combines leading oscilloscope and basic logic analyzer capabilities so that engineers can conveniently visualize and correlate analog and digital signals on a single instrument.

"Embedded system designers are often working with both analog and digital signals in their designs and need powerful yet easy-to-use test tools for both," said Bob Bluhm, Vice President and General Manager, Value Scope Product Line, Tektronix. "The new MSO4000 provides fully featured analog and digital channels, long-record length on all channels, the most powerful productivity tools including the largest display, Wave Inspector, and an industry-best price/performance. With many industry-best features beyond any MSO in the market today, the MSO4000 Series simplifies operation, ensures measurement confidence and are ideal for engineers needing to more efficiently design, debug, and test their embedded designs."

"Having both digital and analog channels and being able to see these together on the same large display makes the Tektronix MSO4000 perfect for the type of work we do with aviation applications," said Jacob Campbell, Design Engineer, Garmin AT, a subsidiary of Garmin International. "I can really get inside the components and see what's going on with test points on the device under test tied to the Tektronix MSO scope. I can do in the real world what I usually have to try to do in simulations. The features provided by this scope have made my job easier. Without question, the Tektronix MSO4000 is one of the most useful pieces of test equipment I have ever had."

Leading Performance

The MSO4000 oscilloscope family consists of four models ranging from 350 MHz to 1 GHz, with two or four analog channels and 16 digital channels to provide up to 20 time-correlated channels. The MSO4032 and MSO4034 provide bandwidth of 350 MHz on two and four analog channels respectively. The MSO4054 provides 500 MHz bandwidth across four analog channels and the MSO4104 offers 1 GHz bandwidth on the four analog channels. The MSO4104 provides 5 GS/s sampling on all channels while the other models provide 2.5 GS/s on all channels. All models come standard with 10M record length on all analog and digital channels.

The MSO4000 provides two methods for capturing digital waveform data. The main digital acquisition mode captures 10M points at 500 MS/s (2 ns resolution). The MSO4000 also provides MagniVu ultra high resolution technology that acquires 10,000 points at up to 16.5 GS/s (60.6 ps resolution). Both the main and MagniVu waveforms are acquired on every trigger and can be viewed at any time, running or stopped. MagniVu provides greater than eight times faster timing resolution than any other MSO on the market, instilling confidence when making critical timing measurements on digital channels.

"By combining excellent oscilloscope capabilities with basic logic analyzer features in the same time domain, the portable Tektronix MSO4000 addresses our needs for design verification and test," said Ryan Fisher, NAND Applications Engineer, Micron Technology. "The MSO4000 provides familiar oscilloscope operation, gives me the full system 'big picture' on one screen and meets our system development needs for NAND Flash memory used in many embedded designs. The fine resolution afforded by MagniVu has been a real asset in finding difficult to discover problems. The MSO4000 enables the engineering team at Micron Technology to more quickly find and solve problems."

Leading Ease of Use

The MSO4000 offers the groundbreaking Wave Inspector on all analog and digital channels, an unprecedented set of easy-to-use tools for discovery and efficient viewing, navigating, and analyzing waveform data. Managing up to 20 channels, each with 10M record length, has been dramatically simplified through automated waveform pan and zoom, user definable markers and intelligent search and find modes. All MSO4000 models provide a 10.4 inch, XGA color display, the largest and highest resolution display in its class. Not only is the MSO4000 the most capable oscilloscope in its segment of the market, at only 5.4 inches deep the MSO4000 is the shallowest on the market—requiring less bench space than competing products—and weighs only 11 pounds for easy portability.

The MSO4000 combines leading specifications, familiar operation, innovative troubleshooting capabilities, and comprehensive support for monitoring, triggering, and decoding parallel buses and the most common serial buses used in embedded design such as I2C, SPI, CAN, and RS-232. "The ability to decode buses, including parallel buses and RS232 signals, combined with the event viewer in the MSO4000 oscilloscope, is a tremendous help in debugging circuits," Campbell added. "These tools take care of the tedious work of decoding the bus manually and searching through the data to find the event in question. This means less time searching for the problem, leading to quicker solutions."

New P6516 Digital Probe

Along with the new MSO4000 oscilloscopes, Tektronix is introducing the P6516 digital probe. This unique probe design offers two eight channel pods that can each probe parts up to eight feet apart, facilitating the reach to multiple areas on a board with a single probe. Color-coding of the leads correlates the probe tips to the signal trace on the display. The sleek P6516 probe leads do not get tangled, making connecting to the device under test simple.

Pricing and Availability

U.S. MSRP for the MSO4000 range from $8,700 for the MSO4032 model to $17,200 for the MSO4104 model. One P6516 probe is included with each MSO4000 model purchased. All MSO4000 models are available for purchase and delivery.

This MSO (mixed signal oscilloscope) line from Tektronix is in phase with the meteoric rise in the use of FPGAs (field programmable logic arrays). Indeed, FPGA suppliers Altera and Xilinx are experiencing double-digit growth, largely accruable to the explosion in embedded computing systems.

Along with this spectacular FPGA growth, though, comes the need to effectively probe signals during product development. Unfortunately, most lab scopes are limited to two, or perhaps four, analog channels, and that's it.

What's need is a cost-effective mixed-signal instrument that bridges digital and analog domains. You may want to look at the input of an A/D (analog-to-digital) converter, for example, while simultaneously monitoring its digital output, and perhaps observe the address and data lines of an associated microprocessor, too.

Beg, Borrow, Or Steal?

If you don't have enough channels on your present scope to do the job, you may find yourself begging, borrowing, or stealing (gasp) someone else's scope and/or logic analyzer. MSOs are a way to deal with making measurements of both analog and digital signals, and doing it with one instrument and probe set.

That's where Tek's MSO4000 5X over-sampling scopes come in. With 16 digital channels, they drive like conventional oscilloscopes, packing both analog and digital channels, and the 5X oversampling ensures that single-shot bandwidth is equal to analog bandwidth. Having familiar switches and controls is important on an instrument like this if you don't routinely use a logic analyzer; it's easy to be overwhelmed by a logic analyzer if you don't use one frequently.

Significantly, Tek's MSO4000 scopes sidestep the complexity and cabling associated with using multiple instruments to probe analog and digital signals in a mixed-signal environment. Using an MSO4000 is straightforward, with a user-friendly interface.

Color Coded Traces

For example, when drawing digital waveforms, color is used to identify the logical state of the digital waveform. When the logical state is high, the waveform is colored green. When the state is low, it's colored blue. This can be especially useful when you're zoomed in to the point where a digital channel is the same state all the way across the display, showing whether it's high or low.

The MSO4000 family of scopes also uses multiple-transition detection hardware. When it detects multiple transitions, a white edge appears on the display. White edges indicate that more information is available by zooming in or acquiring at faster sampling rates.

In most cases, zooming will reveal pulses not visible at previous settings. If a white edge is still present after zooming in as far as possible, you get an indication that increasing the sample rate on the next acquisition will reveal higher frequency information than the previous settings could acquire.

View And Search

Tek's press release notes (on the left) also refer to the company's MagniVu system. The MSO4000 provides MagniVu high-resolution signal acquisition akin to that used in Tek's existing TLA5000 Series logic analyzers. The MSO's also provide a powerful Wave Inspector search engine.

With today's micros routinely clocking above 100-MHz, it pays to have a scope that packs sufficient resolution to resolve timing. That's where MagniVu comes in. As the press statement notes, it samples all digital channels with resolution as fine as the industry-spec 60-ps, for 10,000 samples. This order of resolution can let you verify timing margins such as set-up and hold violations.

Speaking of set-up and hold, an MSO4000 offers special multi-channel set-up and hold triggering. With many scopes, testing for violations can be a time consuming chore, as most scopes only let you check one data line at a time. This may be adequate for a JK flip-flop, but if testing an 8 or 16-bit bus, it means performing the same task repeatedly to verify each bit of the bus one at a time.

The MSO4000s change that picture. They're arguably the first MSOs to offer multi-channel set-up and hold triggering. You can now monitor, debug, and test an entire parallel bus at once, rather than a single bit at a time.

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Any MSO4000 Series scope can also acquire up to 10-Mpoints of data on each of its two or four analog channels, as well as each of its 16 digital channels. Tek claims this is the longest standard record length for this class of product, and it's available on all 20 channels.

Zoom And Pan

While such a long record length is valuable for capturing long time windows with high resolution, it presents challenges working with that amount of captured data. Imagine acquiring thousands of screens of information and then not having a useful way to wade through the dataset. As such, Tek's MSO4000s offer features and tools for working with long record length acquisitions.

For example, you can zoom and pan using a two-tier front-panel knob. The inner knob adjusts zoom scale. The outer knob pans a zoom box across the waveform to quickly get to the portion of the waveform you're interested in.

The outer knob also uses force-feedback to determine how fast to pan on a waveform. The farther the outer knob is turned, the faster the zoom box moves.

Even with 10-Mpoint records, you can move from one end of an acquisition to the other in mere seconds, changing pan direction by reversing the knob's rotation. Using the pan knob there's no need to navigate through multiple menus to adjust zoom views.

Automatic Scrolling

A look at an MSO4000's front panel also reveals a Play/Pause button. Pushing it lets the MSO automatically scroll through a waveform so you can look for anomalies or events of interest. Playback speed and direction are controlled with the pan knob.

Like the zoom knob, turning the pan knob further makes the waveform scroll faster; changing direction is done by turning the knob the other way.

If you don't want to inspect an entire record to find an event, MSO4000s feature a waveform search feature. It lets you search through a long acquisition based on user-defined criteria such as pulse width, logic state, or even parallel and serial bus content. All occurrences of the event are highlighted with search marks.

Waveform Navigation

You can navigate to them using front-panel Previous and Next buttons to compare multiple occurrences of search events spread out through a long record length acquisition. And, a Set Mark button can leave one or more bookmarks on your waveform. Navigating between the marks is then accomplished by pressing the Previous and Next buttons.

The MSO4000s also let you readily establish parallel bus triggering, saving hours decoding system bus activity by evaluating the state of data and address lines at clock edges. MSO4000s simplify this by providing the ability to create parallel buses.

By specifying which channels are clock and data lines, you can create a parallel bus display that automatically decodes bus content. An MSO4000 enables the definition and display of up to four parallel buses at one time, letting you readily view decoded parallel bus data over time.

What's more, you can trigger the scope on bus values. Wave Inspector's search capability also includes searching through long digital acquisitions, simplifying the identification of digital as well as analog events of interest.

Serial Bus Triggering

For serial buses such as I²C, SPI, RS-232, and CAN, debugging system level problems involving one or more serial buses typically takes a long time due to the difficulties in isolating traffic of interest going across the bus, and the tedious process of manually decoding messages one bit at a time.

In contrast, an MSO4000 lets you define the scope's inputs to be an I²C, SPI, RS-232, or CAN bus. You can trigger the scope on packet-level information such as specific addresses, data, identifiers, or missing ACKs. Each defined bus is also automatically decoded, with all packet content presented in a bus waveform on the display.

Wave Inspector's search capability can also be used to search through a long acquisition of serial bus data in order to find identified events of interest.

Any time there's a bus displayed on the scope, event tables can also be turned on to view bus activity. These tables offer the ability to view decoded parallel or serial bus data in a listing format.

You can also display any combination of up to four serial or parallel buses. You can monitor up to four I²C, SPI, RS-232, CAN and parallel buses. You could, for example, monitor several I²C buses while triggering on data output from an FPGA.

Matching Probe

To ease all of this, Tektronix brings MSO4000 probe connections to the front panel. The scopes' P6516 logic probes, an integral part of the MSO4000 Series architecture, include 16 logic channels in addition to the two or four analog channels.

The P6516 brings all 16 signals to a single input connector. The P6516 probes also add only 3-pF of capacitance to a point under test. According to Tektronix, competing probes load a circuit down a bit more heavily, typically showing about 12-pF of capacitive loading.

As Tek notes in its release, the P6516's 16 channels are also separated into two 8-channel pods that attach to the instrument using a 4-ft. ribbon cable. Both the ribbon cable and individual channel leads are special coax cables not prone to tangling.

The lowest-order channel coax on each pod is also colored blue. It's common practice to associate digital leads in the same sequence as the bits on a parallel bus. Channel 0 connects to Bit 0, Channel 1 to Bit 1, etc. The blue leads, attached to the least significant bits in their respective groups of eight, lets you keep track of this sequence.

Second-Level Color Coding

But wait. There's more. A second level of color-coding unmistakably ties each specific pod channel to a respective trace on the display. Each channel among the eight in a pod is labeled (following the well-known resistor color code) on the pod housing and on the probe head. This same color appears on a tab marking the channel's trace on the MSO4000's display, too.

Finally, the P6516 probe offers four methods of attachment. You can use a grabber tip, or a flush-mount adapter for connecting to a square pin header. You can also choose a conventional handheld tip, or a high-density Mictor breakout adaptor. These attachment methods let you brows from pad to pad on a board, or use the plug-in connections that would remain in place during a long series of measurements.

Cost Effectiveness

Consider that you can get one of these scopes for as little as $8700. That will buy you a 350-MHz Model MSO4032 that samples at 2.5-Gsamples/s and provides dual analog channels and 16 digital logic inputs. The price includes a P6516 500-MHz probe. Wow.

For $10,900 you can buy an MSO4034 that boosts the number of analog channels to four. An MSO4054 model, priced at $13,900, is a 500-MHz version, with four analog and 16 digital channels. It includes one P6516 probe.

Finally, the $17,200 MSO4104 is the all-out 1-GHz version, with four analog and 16 digital channels, with probe. Tek's VPI (Versatile Probe Interface) accessory accommodates a 1-GHz bandwidth probe.

Click here to access a datasheet in Adobe Acrobat .PDF format.

For more details, contact Tektronix, Inc., 14150 S.W. Karl Braun Dr., PO Box 500, Beaverton, Ore. 97077-0001. Phone: 503-627-3485. Fax: 503-627-3678.

Tektronix, 503-627-3485, www.tektronix.com