New Series of 300 MHz, 500 MHz, 1 GHz Oscilloscopes Offer Embedded Systems Developers Unprecedented Waveform Viewing, Competitive Pricing

PALO ALTO, Calif.---Agilent Technologies Inc. introduces 12 portable digital storage and mixed signal oscilloscopes (DSOs/MSOs) with bandwidths of 300 MHz, 500 MHz and the industry's first portable 1 GHz offering. With a real-time display update rate up to 30 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 oscilloscopes provide industry-leading waveform viewing and measurement insight for embedded system designers in the aerospace/defense, automotive, communications and consumer electronics industries.

For the most exceptional waveform viewing, these oscilloscopes feature Agilent's patented MegaZoom III display technology. MegaZoom III provides exceptional real-time, high-resolution XGA waveform viewing with 256 levels of color-intensity grades, and memory depth up to a full 8 Meg points---800 times more than the competition. The MegaZoom III's 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," said Galen Wampler, industry analyst at Prime Data. "Agilent's new portable oscilloscopes will provide the performance needed to address these measurement challenges. Optimized waveform update rates and display resolution, plus the ability to add 16 logic-timing channels, will significantly reduce debugging time."

"The new 6000 Series provides the exceptional memory and waveform display performance of a lab scope in an affordable, portable product configuration," said Ron Nersesian, vice president and general manager of Agilent's Design Validation Division. "Customers will no longer need to switch to larger lab scopes that are optimized for advanced waveform analysis to capture and display critical signals at sustained sampling speeds over longer time spans. This is a major shortcoming of competing products."

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 customers can initially order a 2+16 or 4+16 channel MSO or a traditional DSO and easily upgrade to an MSO configuration later.

The 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 large memory records, screen images and settings on standard higher-speed, higher-capacity USB memory sticks.

U.S. Pricing and Availability

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

Factory-installed memory upgrades start at $500. Customer-installable DSO-to-MSO upgrade kits start at $1,800.

For starters, Agilent's scope line-up includes what are arguably the first 1-GHz portables (Tek's competing models carry 600-MHz bandwidth specs). Also, while Tek's TDS3000B's use 6.3-in. TFT (thin-film transistor) VGA displays, Agilent's same-sized TFT betters Tek's 640 x 480 pixel resolution to the XGA regime at 1024 x 768 pixels.

Bigger, More Intense

That translates to a waveform viewing area of 1000 x 640, as opposed to Tektronix's 500 x 316 viewing area. What's more, while the 3000B scopes provide 16 levels of color intensity, Agilent's 1000-pixel-wide screens jack up color intensity levels to 256.

In terms of performance, Tek's TDS3000B oscilloscopes process 3600 waveforms/s; Agilent's competing scopes run at 100,000 waveforms/s. With that speed, you can readily capture and view random and infrequently occurring events, such as glitches.

Agilent also notes that when evaluating a scope, responsiveness is important. If you're probing a fast repetitive signal, and the scope's display updates too slowly, the sluggishness can drive you nuts; some deep-memory oscilloscopes, when processing deep-memory records, can slow a scope's update rate (as a rule of thumb, if an oscilloscope's display is updated at least 20 times/s, the displayed waveform will appear live and the scope will feel responsive).

Beyond Responsiveness

But, the importance of waveform update rates extends beyond responsiveness. A lively feel gives no indication of a scope's probability of capturing infrequent or random signal events. Indeed, some scope makers tout instruments with hundreds-of-thousands of waveforms/s update rates, but the human eye can't discern differences in performance at those levels. Nonetheless, update rates like that are critical because they increase the probability of capturing infrequent events.

If signals were always repetitive, with no glitches, extremely fast update rates wouldn't be much of an issue, would they? But when signals aren't repetitive, that's when a scope with a faster update rate can enhance the probability of capturing elusive events.

Significantly, Agilent says its scopes demand no special acquisition modes that you might have to laboriously select in order to obtain fast update rates. The fast updates are achieved using the scope's default operating mode (it uses realtime sampling and includes connect-the-dots and sin(x)/x waveform reconstruction).

Mixed-Signal Acquisition

In terms of input channels, the Agilent 6000 Series includes two- and four-channel versions as well as MSOs (mixed-signal oscilloscopes). The mixed-signal MSOs are available with two analog plus 16 digital channels; and four analog plus 16 channels

Tektronix's TDS3000B Series offer only two-channel or four-channel versions (however, Tek's scopes sample at rates up to 5-Gsamples/s; Agilent's sample at up to 4-Gsamples/s). Regardless of sampling rate, Agilent contends that the additional channels in the MSO versions of its new scopes let you trigger on and view complex mixed-signal events with relative ease.

Driving With Mr. Murphy

When I sat down in front of one of these new scopes with Agilent program manager Jerry Murphy, one of the first things he mentioned was that I would be driving a portable scope with the highest realtime display rate in the industry. Echoing comments in Agilent's press statement (on the left) Murphy reminded me that it's 30 times faster than the competition.

To prove his point, Murphy demo'd an Agilent MSO6054A scope on a signal with an infrequent metastable state, comparing its performance to a Tektronix TDS3054B. "The TDS3054B, operating in its fast trigger mode and with infinite persistence," pointed out Murphy, "fails to capture the metastable state, even after holding the probe on the test point for ten seconds.

"In contrast, the MSO6054A, also operating in infinite persistence mode, instantly displays the infrequently occurring metastable state. The scope's optional 8-Mpoint memory depth---1-Meg is standard---gives a far more detailed analysis." As the press release points out, Murphy emphasizes that the scope's deep memory is 800 times better than the competition. "It'll let you capture long time spans, and let you zoom in on significant signal details that you might otherwise miss," he adds.

Observing Entire Data Packets

To observe the flow of critical information in today's high-speed serial bus schemes, Murphy also feels that you've got to be able to view wider time spans. And, you need to be able to isolate specific events of interest. That requires the ability to trigger on a specific address or on data within the traffic.

"Shallow-memory digital storage scopes might have the bandwidth to capture these signals," says Murphy, "but they fail to maintain their sampling speed when the timebase is adjusted to a setting that lets you observe an entire data packet. A shallow-memory scope is forced to decimate its sampling speed as time windows are expanded."

Murphy also notes that a drop in sampling speed as sweep speed increases will adversely affect a scope's ability to accurately display information in high-speed packets as found in high-speed serial I/O schemes. "A 10Base-T LAN's bus signal, for example, must be captured at 10-µs/division; a shallow-memory scope won't be able to provide details because it'll be under-sampling."

Murphy offers another example, this time citing a high-speed PCI bus. "It requires a sweep speed of 1-µs/division. The bus signal in that case wouldn't be captured with a Tektronix TDS3052 scope, for example, even though that instrument appears to have the advantage of higher basic sampling speed."

To back up his claims, Murphy offers a comparative table of specs. Click on this image to view his comparison of realtime update specs.

Click for larger table

The new Agilent oscilloscopes also offer a number of built-in connectivity features. There's a USB (Universal Serial Bus) port, and it's thoughtfully placed on the scopes' front panels (as well as on the back panels).

Connectivity Hooks

Also included are LAN and IEEE-488/GPIB ports, and there's a XGA video-out connector as well. That's for feeding an external display. Tektronix's TDS3000B's also have LAN and parallel ports, but GPIB, video, and serial ports are options.

So there you have it, but there are a lot more details available from Agilent about these scopes, and what's under the hood. For more information from Agilent's dedicated Web pages, click here.

To read an Agilent-authored paper on scope update rates, click on this image:

Click to read Acrobat .PDF file

Or, contact Jerry Murphy at Agilent Technologies, 1900 Garden Of The Gods Road, Colorado Springs, Colo. 80907-3483. Phone: 719-590-2053. Fax: 719-590-5989. E-mail: jmurphy@agilent.com