November 10, 2011. Rohde & Schwarz has announced a hardware option turns the R&S RTO into a mixed-signal oscilloscope (MSO). With the new option, the R&S RTO high-performance oscilloscope, launched in mid-2010, features 16 digital logic channels with 400-MHz input frequency in addition to the usual two or four analog channels. Equipped with the MSO option, the R&S RTO allows time correlation between the instrument’s analog and digital sections.
The new option targets product development and during sophisticated service work involving the digital signal lines of parallel and serial interfaces—for example, the parallel interfaces of ADCs or DACs an, parallel buses such as PCI or DDR as well as serial buses such as I2C, SPI, LIN, or CAN. For all these applications, the R&S RTO with MSO functionality offers a 5-Gsample/s sampling rate over the entire 200 Msample memory depth. A maximum time resolution of 200 ps makes it possible to accurately analyze signal content and quality. Critical events such as narrow, widely separated signal faults can be reliably detected using the digital channels.
The option comes with hardware-based acquisition, trigger and processing units. Even when the digital channels are on, high acquisition rates of over 200,000 waveforms/second can be achieved. Rare events are detected quickly and reliably, and debugging is speeded up significantly. If system designs must be verified, the digital trigger ensures high precision and flexibility. A wide variety of trigger types helps to pinpoint errors reliably. The easy-to-understand operating concept of the R&S RTO allows users to quickly solve even complex measurement tasks on embedded designs with up to 16 digital channels.