Scopes with digital triggers

Test & Measurement

22 June 2011 Test & Measurement

Rohde & Schwarz has developed a digital oscilloscope that employs a real-time digital trigger. Designated the RTO series, the instrument is designed to aid in debugging embedded systems.

The real-time digital trigger in the RTO uses a common signal path for both the trigger and acquired data. This eliminates time and amplitude offset between the trigger and signal, enabling signals to be displayed with the least possible trigger jitter and allowing precise results to be achieved when measuring complex waveforms.

Analog triggers typically have a long re-arm cycle, and while re-arming, the instrument cannot react to trigger events, which means signal properties that should act as triggers are masked. Because the RTO scopes’ digital trigger does not need to re-arm, every sample can trigger data acquisition to avoid missing events. In addition, errors in serial interfaces are often caused by sporadic signal faults at the physical layer, so high acquisition rates are essential in order to detect them. Since these new instruments acquire and display signals using hardware, blind time is minimised and errors are located quickly.

Also, many embedded systems employ serial data interfaces to control external devices and simply viewing the waveform is not sufficient to fully debug the operation of these systems. The RTO features an integrated trigger and decode feature that allows users to trigger on protocol-specific features and to display the captured waveform in binary, ASCII or HEX formats. The trigger and decode feature supports SPI, I²C, CAN, LIN and RS232.

For more information contact Trevor Grundlingh, Protea Electronics, +27 (0)11 719 5700, [email protected], www.protea.co.za

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Scopes with digital triggers

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