Firmware boosts oscilloscope throughput

Tektronix Inc. has released a new firmware for the DPO7000, DPO/DSA70000 and DPO/DSA70000B series oscilloscopes that provide up to 20x throughput improvements for all measurements and applications utilizing finite impulse response (FIR) filters. The most notable performance gains are realized when processing long record length waveforms with FIR filtering enabled, as required for many high-speed serial data analysis applications.

The latest generation of high-speed serial data standards pushes the limits of test instrumentation, requiring a robust combination of performance and analysis capabilities. The DPO/DSA70000B series oscilloscopes is claimed to offer the highest signal fidelity, with best jitter noise floor, best vertical noise performance, flattest frequency response, greatest effective number of bits and scalable performance up to 20GHz. This level of performance is necessary for testing high-speed third generation serial bus architectures. In an era of constrained resources, it is vital that instruments help designers to perform measurements quickly and efficiently. The new firmware further extends Tektronix's performance capabilities by reducing the time needed to perform crucial measurements.

"As the industry's oscilloscope leader, we are committed to continually improving our products for the benefit of current and future customers to ensure they can rely on Tektronix for the most reliable and widest range of test and measurement equipment available," said Brian Reich, VP, performance oscilloscopes, Tektronix. "The new firmware delivers an enormous performance gain that will increase designers' productivity even as serial data test requirements continue to increase in complexity."

The new firmware offers gains in a number of areas—it improves the performance for popular application packages as diverse as Jitter Analysis, HDMI and Ethernet compliance testing, and many more. The level of performance improvement scales with filter settings and the length of the waveforms to be processed. For example, the time to apply the filter in the Serial Data Link Analysis (SDLA) application for a 20M record length went from 1 minute to 3 seconds.

The DPO/DSA70000B series oscilloscopes provide the bandwidth needed to debug serial data signals up to 12Gbit/s on all channels simultaneously, ideal for multilane applications including PCIe 3, SATA 6Gbit/s, SuperSpeed USB, HDMI, DisplayPort and Ethernet. The FastAcq acquisition mode provides a capture rate greater than 300,000 waveforms per second—about 100x faster than competing alternatives—delivering both critical insight into signal behavior and in-depth analysis.

Tektronix also offers a broad range of software packages for high-speed serial data design debug and compliance verification. This includes DPOJET for jitter and timing analysis, SDLA for testing transmitter, interconnects and receivers, and standard-specific packages for DDR, DisplayPort, PCIe, USB, HDMI, SATA, Ethernet, Fibre Channel and others.

The DPO7000 series oscilloscopes provide the signal fidelity, triggering, protocol decode and search capabilities needed to debug, characterize and analyze 1st generation serial data, RF, memory and general purpose devices. With models ranging in bandwidth from 500MHz to 3.5GHz, the DPO7000 and its high waveform acquisition capability are ideal for complex signal characterization challenges.

The firmware upgrades are available as a free download from the Tektronix Website for all current DPO7000, DPO/DSA70000 and DPO/DSA70000B users.