April 2015
16
T
OOLS
& S
OFTWARE
Touch, discover, and solve –
demand more from your next scope!
By Taku Furuta,
Keysight Technologies
Modern oscilloscopes offer so much
more beyond the traditional top
four specifications. Touch technology
has become an option with
oscilloscope design as with all other
devices, and helps trigger
signals instantaneously. The Keysight
InfiniiVision 3000T X-Series is one
example of the latest scopes equipped
with this and many other new features.
Nowadays most digital oscilloscopes in
the market meet the minimum speci cation
requirements for general purpose trouble-
shooting and debugging, which was not the
case ten years ago. e bandwidth, sampling
rate, channel count, and memory depth are
known as the top four speci cations of the
scope, and in these respects the majority of
scopes now provide more than adequate per-
formance. e good news is that digital oscil-
loscopes are rapidly evolving beyond these top
speci cations to provide extra value. Demand
more from your next oscilloscope!
Beyond the top four speci cations, you
quickly realize the latest scopes have better
displays, o en with better waveform visualiza-
tion technologies. Why are display and visual-
ization important? Because the oscilloscope is
fundamentally a waveform viewing tool. For
example, the Keysight In niiVision 3000T
X-Series provides an 8.5-inch capacitive touch
screen display with an ultra-fast one million
waveforms per second update rate using pro-
prietary MegaZoom IV technology. e faster
the waveform-update rate, the higher is the
probability of visually discovering anomalies
in designs due to a lower dead-time between
each acquisition. Dead-time is the inevitable
time between acquisitions where an oscillo-
scope cannot acquire any data due to process-
ing previously acquired data. In another word,
you could be missing true anomalies that exist
in the design simply because the oscilloscope
does not update waveforms fast enough. At
the end of the day, if you can’t see a problem,
it’s hard to x it.
Note that many of new scopes nowadays
come with a standard touchscreen, some with
the latest capacitive technology just like your
favorite smart phones. Capacitive touch tech-
nology became popular several years ago, but
today, it is expected as standard. Demand
your next scope to have it!
Some scopes leverage the higher level of
usability that a capacitive touchscreen o ers
to address the common usability challenge
of powerful but complex advanced triggers.
Setting them up appropriately is a challenge
even for oscilloscope experts. In the case of
the In niiVision 3000T X-Series, the Zone
Touch Trigger comes standard in addition
to the advanced triggers. With Zone Touch
Trigger, you can draw a box around the sig-
nal of interest, select must or must not inter-
sect, and then the scope triggers and isolates
it. e tedious advance trigger setup could
take more than 10 steps and still might not
isolate what you want, but with the new zone
touch trigger, if you can see it, you can trig-
ger on it. Demand better signal isolation
from your next scope!
Furthermore, the capacitive touchscreen
enables productivity. Moving, icking, and pre-
cisely positioning waveforms at your ngertip
are easier than ever. Customize the docking
information side bar in the way that best suits
measurement needs. e alphanumeric keypad
replaces a tedious knob rotation entry to accel-
erate annotation experience and data inputs. In
addition, the In niiVision 3000T X-Series o ers
three ways to access scope features: touch GUI
for those who prefer tablet or smart phone touch
interfaces, front panel buttons and knobs for
traditional oscilloscope users, and the Keysight
Insight pull-down menu for users who prefer
Windows-like operations.
Once you discover and isolate the phenom-
enon of interest, it is time to solve the prob-
lems. e instruments integration is another
trend in oscilloscopes to provide more ben-
e ts beyond the banner speci cations. e
In niiVision 3000T X-Series integrates six
instruments in one scope to make it a home-
base measurement instrument. e 16 digi-
tal channels help not only to visualize digital
signal phenomena, but also to time-correlate
them with analog signals, like a logic analyzer.
With virtually every digital designs includ-
ing one or more low speed serial protocol
buses like I²C, SPI, or CAN today, the hard-
ware-based serial protocol trigger and decode
solutions relieve engineers from error-prone
Figure 1. the Keysight
In niiVision 3000T X-Series
provides an 8.5-inch capacitive
touchscreen display with an
ultra-fast one million
waveforms per second update
rate using proprietary
MegaZoom IV technology.
