Agilent Technologies has introduced an automotive triggering and real-time decode option for its 6000 series oscilloscopes to help automotive engineers find and debug errors and signal integrity problems in CAN/LIN-based designs faster than they could with other oscilloscope-based solutions.
The N5424A CAN/LIN option features hardware-accelerated CAN and LIN serial bus decode to produce fast decode update rates. The firm said that other oscilloscope solutions with CAN triggering and protocol decode use post-processed software techniques to decode CAN frames, and it claimed that waveform and decode updates can sometimes take seconds each, especially when engineers use deep memory, as they often do for capturing packetized serial signals.
Agilent said its solution is capable of updating at up to 100,000 real-time waveforms per second, and hex-level serial decode can be updated faster than the human eye can discern. The waveform update rates, display quality and fast CAN/LIN decode update rates can enable designers to find and debug random and intermittent errors and signal-integrity problems that could otherwise be missed.
Engineers can trigger on standard or extended CAN message IDs, including the message ID of a remote transfer request frame. The CAN/LIN option supports triggering on a data frame and allows engineers to specify message IDs, data and data length for filtering messages of interest. Triggering on active error frames is also supported.