Oscilloscope vendors highlight resolution, channel count

Instrument manufacturers are looking to meet customers' needs for features not found in traditional oscilloscopes, based on recent product releases from Yokogawa and Teledyne LeCroy. The latter introduced instruments with 12-bit ADCs, while Yokogawa released scopes with eight channels.

Yokogawa's new offering is the DLM4000, which the company describes as the industry’s only eight-channel mixed-signal oscilloscope. It combines the large screen and eight-channel capability of Yokogawa’s earlier eight-channel DL7480 oscilloscope with the mixed-signal technology of the company’s DLM2000 Series. For its part, Teledyne LeCroy today introduced two series of high-definition oscilloscopes with what the company calls HD4096 high-definition technology. The new scopes—the HDO4000 and HDO6000—acquire waveforms with high resolution, high sample rate, and low noise. Waveform displays offer 16 times more vertical resolution than traditional 8-bit instruments.

In a prerelease product demonstration of the Teledyne LeCroy scopes, Stephen Murphy, product marketing manager, demonstrated how the extra vertical bits of the new scopes can expose artifacts such as ripple on a square wave that would be lost to quantization noise in 8-bit scopes. His specific example pertained to MOSFETs used in a switch-mode power supply, where the 12-bit HDO instrument shows a clean saturation-voltage trace with plenty of detail. HDO product details are here.

As reported earlier, the Yokogawa DLM4000 Series comprises two models with bandwidths of 350 and 500 MHz and a sampling rate of 1.25 GS/s, expandable to 2.5 GS/s with interleaving. The inputs can be allocated as eight analog channels or seven analog channels plus one eight-bit digital input. A future logic-expansion option will offer sixteen additional channels of logic for a total of seven channels of analog input with simultaneous 24-bit digital input.

“As intelligent control permeates more and more sectors of the industry from consumer electronics to industrial drives, the signals that engineers need to look at for testing become faster and more complex,” said Tom Quinlan, Yokogawa’s general manager of test and measurement for North America, in a press release. “As a result, the four analog channels of the traditional oscilloscope are no longer adequate to address these challenges—hence the need for an eight-channel instrument like the DLM4000.”