FROM EDN EUROPE: LeCroy adds measurement muscle to "everyday" scopes

The third series of oscilloscopes in LeCroy's WaveRunner line, the 6000 series, takes the range into the lower cost, "everyday"-scope category (Picture). The company based the scopes on silicon-germanium technology it acquired from IBM. Five units use the X-Stream signal-capture technology and the Wavemeter user interface with 350-MHz to 2-GHz real-time bandwidth and prices from €8,890 to €27,990 for units with base-memory configurations. Scope layout follows traditional lines with rotary knobs for key settings on each channel; most are speed-sensitive digital encoders and have a secondary function that you access by pushing them. For example, pushing the vertical-shift control zeros or centres the trace on the screen. The LCD screen is also a touchscreen, giving single-touch access to all key configuration settings.

Models range from the four-channel, 350-MHz version with 2.5G-sample/sec rate on all channels through two- and four-channel units with 500-MHz, 1-GHz, or 2-GHz bandwidth and 5G-sample/sec rates (interleaved to 10G samples/sec on the top two models). Memory options can take the scopes to 12 million or 24 million points. The lower speed scopes use the base 10G-sample/sec analogue-to-digital converter of the WaveRunner line that, in the high-performance Pro models, uses one per channel. LeCroy multiplexes them over two or more channels in the 6000 units and still provide the same measurement fidelity. Therefore, LeCroy can implement "interleaving" by suspending the multiplexing in this configuration.

The 6000 models also share much of the software code with their predecessors and the same measurement-processing architecture. In the X-Stream design, analysis algorithms run entirely in the cache memory of the Pentium processor in this PC-based design, removing the need to save intermediate results to memory. This approach speeds the analysis and increases the amount of analysis the device can perform by as many as two orders of magnitude, LeCroy claims. As ever with LeCroy scopes, long memory—and the ability to zoom in on detail within it with high resolution—feature prominently. You can optionally order software-measurement packs that add analysis and mask-compliance tests, or you can write and integrate your own test in a variety of formats, including VisualBasic, MatLab, and Excel.

The company has introduced a probe to match the 500-MHz versions; the ×10 passive probe sells for approximately €200. It features fine barrel-and-tip diameters for probing fine-pitch devices. As a PC-based instrument, the scope comes with a 40-Gbyte hard-disk drive and CD drive, plus all of the standard interfaces you would expect of a PC.

LeCroy, +49 62 21 82700, www.lecroy.com.