Nowadays, designers have to perform more and more embedded testing and digital debugging in addition to their other typical work. So, Tektronix designed its affordable MSO 4000 series of oscilloscopes to address the ever-increasing complexity in the products that engineers design—as well as their need to do things faster.
This small but fully featured mixed-signal oscilloscope (MSO) targets engineers who design, test, and debug embedded controller products with multiple serial interfaces as well as related circuitry. While it isn’t a fully featured logic analyzer, it does incorporate impressive digital signal test and analysis features that will almost make you believe you don’t need a logic analyzer.
Each of the four MSO 4000 models provides 16 digital logic channels, giving you more than enough inputs to test almost anything you’re working on. They also have four analog channels, except the MSO 4032, which has two. The timing resolution is 60.6 ps (16.5 Gsamples/s) on all digital channels.
The MSO 4034 and MSO 4032 have a 350-MHz bandwidth and a 2.5-Gbit/s sampling rate. The MSO 4054 has a 500-MHz bandwidth with 2.5-Gbit/s sampling rate. The high-end MSO 4104 has a 1-GHz bandwidth with a 5-Mbit/s sampling rate (see the figure). Those rates apply to all channels, which have a maximum record length of 10M.
The 10.4-in., XGA format screen is easy to get used to. You also can easily see all 20 channels clearly at one time. The digital signals are displayed with green high, blue low, and white rise/fall, making them easier than ever to interpret.
With the scopes’ Wave Inspector, you can search, pan, and zoom for waveforms. It lets you identify glitches faster, examine the details of any signal, and manage and examine the long record lengths more conveniently. This works on the digital channels too. The scope can display bus data as well as trigger and search on specific data values as well.
The MSO 4104 offers optional support for I2C, RS-232, SPI, and CAN. Also, it can capture, decode, trigger on, and search for specific codes. It displays the hex values of words along with the pulses, speeding up embedded troubleshooting.
The unique digital probe is designed as two groups of eight color-coded probe lines. Those color codes are duplicated on the screen to help you identify which line is which. Prices range from $8700 for the MSO 4032 to $17,200 for the MSO 4104.
Tektronix Inc.
www.tektronix.com