News and New Products

Small footprint value-priced scopes offer bigger displays, deeper memory, bus debugging, and more

By Dan Strassberg, Contributing Technical Editor -- EDN, 4/22/2008

Tektronix’s new DPO3000-series of lunchbox-sized, two- and four-channel, 100-, 300-, and 500-MHz-bandwidth scopes provides more than three times the screen area and 500 times the waveform-memory depth of Tek’s largest selling scopes, based on unit volume—the small-footprint TDS3000 series. The DPO3000s, which target embedded-system developers, accomplish these feats in a 9-lb package whose height and width are only marginally greater than those of the TDS3000s and whose 5.4-in. depth is approximately 10% less. Prices for the new scopes are about 10% higher than those of their counterparts in the older series. The new units incorporate the company’s Wave Inspector technology, which facilitates searching through long waveform records for anomalous events. Additionally, for debugging, the new units trigger from and decode the activity on five popular embedded-system buses: SPI (serial peripheral interface), I²C (inter-IC), RS-232, CAN (controller-area network), and LIN (local-interconnect network).

Despite capabilities that eclipse those of the nearly decade-old TDS3000 series at only modestly greater prices, the new series will not replace the older products for the foreseeable future, according to David Pereles, value-scope-product manager at the company. He says the older series has won more devotees than any family of digital scopes in history, and, despite increasing calls for the DPO3000s’ new features at prices close to those of the older units, many customers find that the older products can still meet their measurement needs, making it unnecessary to mix product types within instrument inventories.

Tektronix believes the DPO3000s to be the first scopes to incorporate 800×480-pixel WVGA (wide-screen video-graphics-adapter) displays. The screens measure 9 in. diagonally. All models can capture 2.5G samples/sec/channel for an oversampling ratio of at least five times and all provide a memory depth of 5M samples/channel. The screen-update rate is 50,000 waveforms/sec. Connectivity features include an Ethernet port and two USB ports—a front-panel port for memory devices and a rear-panel port for connection to a PC. For bus debugging, the display switches to a text-only mode, but waveform views are just a button press away. US list prices range from $4450 for a two-channel, 100-MHz unit to $10,900 for a four-channel, 500-MHz unit. These prices include National Instruments’ LabView SignalExpress, base version, which you can upgrade to the complete Tektronix Edition for a US suggested price of $699.