The DPO3000 Series offers a variety of analytical solutions including cursors, 29 automatic measurements, statistics and waveform math. Despite a tiny footprint (only 5.4in.deep) and light weight (9lbs.), the DPO3000 Series offers exceptional performance, a large 9in.WVGA widescreen display and knob-per-channel vertical controls.

One of the most common applications requiring long record length is serial data analysis in embedded system design. Embedded systems are literally everywhere. They can contain many different types of devices including microprocessors, microcontrollers, DSPs, RAM, EPROMs, FPGAs, A/Ds, D/As and I/O. These various devices have traditionally communicated with each other and the outside world using wide parallel buses. Today, however, more and more embedded systems are replacing these wide parallel buses with serial buses due to less board space required, fewer pins, lower power, embedded clocks, differential signaling for better noise immunity, and most importantly, lower cost. While serial buses have a large number of benefits, they also present significant challenges that their predecessors (parallel buses) did not. Debugging bus and system problems can be more difficult, because it is harder to isolate events of interest, and it is more difficult to interpret what is displayed on the oscilloscope screen. The DPO3000 Series addresses these problems.

Bus Display - Provides a higher level, combined view of the individual signals (clock, data, chip enable etc.) that make up your bus, making it easy to identify where packets begin and end and identifying sub-packet components such as address, data, identifier, CRC, etc.

Serial Triggering - Trigger on packet content such as start of packet, specific addresses, specific data content, unique identifiers, etc., on the popular serial interfaces I²C, SPI, CAN, LIN, and RS232/422/485/UART.

Bus Decoding - Tired of having to visually inspect the waveform to count clocks, determine if each bit is a 1 or a 0, combine bits into bytes and determine the hex value? Let the oscilloscope do it for you! The oscilloscope can decode each packet on the bus and display the value in hex, binary, decimal, or ASCII (depending on the standard) in the bus waveform.

Packet Decode Table - In addition to seeing decoded packet data on the bus waveform itself, you can view all captured packets in a tabular view much like you would see on a logic analyzer. Packets are time-stamped and listed consecutively with columns for each component (Address, Data, etc.).

Search - Serial triggering is very useful for isolating the event of interest, but once you’ve captured it and need to analyze the surrounding data, what do you do? In the past, users had to manually scroll through the waveform counting and converting bits and looking for what caused the event. With the DPO3000 Series, you can have the oscilloscope search through the acquired data for user-defined criteria including serial packet content. Each occurrence is high-lighted by a search mark. Rapid navigation between marks is as simple as pressing the Previous (←) and Next (→) buttons on the front panel.

Imagine trying to efficiently use the Internet if search engines such as Google and Yahoo didn’t exist, web browser features such as Favorites and Links didn’t exist, or Internet Service Providers like AOL or MSN weren’t around. Now you know how most modern oscilloscope users feel when trying to actually use the long record length in their digital oscilloscope. Record length, one of the key specifications of an oscilloscope, is the number of samples it can digitize and store in a single acquisition. The longer the record length, the longer the time window you can capture with high resolution (high sample rate). The first digital oscilloscopes could capture and store only 500 points which made it very difficult to acquire all relevant information around the event being investigated. Over the years, oscilloscope vendors have provided longer and longer record lengths to meet market demands for long capture windows with high resolution to the point that most mid-range oscilloscopes either come standard with, or can be optionally upgraded to, multi-million-point record lengths. These million-point record lengths often represent thousands of screens worth of signal activity. While standard record lengths have increased greatly over the years and can now satisfy the vast majority of applications in the market-place, tools for effectively and efficiently viewing, navigating and analyzing long record length acquisitions have been sorely neglected until now. The DPO3000 Series addresses the need for working with long record lengths with the following innovative Wave Inspector controls:

Zoom/Pan - A dedicated, two-tier front-panel knob set provides intuitive control of both zooming and panning through acquired records. The inner knob adjusts the zoom factor (or zoom scale); turning it clockwise activates zoom and goes to progressively higher zoom factors, while turning it counter-clockwise results in lower zoom factors and eventually turning zoom off. The outer knob pans the zoom box across the waveform to quickly get to the portion of the waveform you are interested in. The outer knob also utilizes force-feedback to determine how fast to pan on the waveform. The farther you turn the outer knob, the faster the zoom box moves. Pan direction is changed by simply turning the knob the other way. No longer do you need to navigate through multiple menus to adjust your zoom view.

Play/Pause - A dedicated play/pause button on the front panel scrolls the waveform across the display automatically while you look for anomalies or an event of interest. Playback speed and direction are controlled using the intuitive pan knob. Once again, turning the knob further makes the waveform scroll faster and changing direction is as simple as turning the knob the other way.

User Marks - See something interesting on your waveform? Press the Set Mark button on the front panel to leave one or more “bookmarks” on the waveform. Navigating between marks is as simple as pressing the Previous (←) and Next (→) buttons on the front panel.

Search Marks - Don’t want to take the time to inspect the entire acquisition to find the event you’re looking for? The DPO3000 Series features robust waveform search that allows you to search through your long acquisition based on user-defined criteria. All occurrences of the event are highlighted with search marks and are easily navigated to, using the front panel's Previous (←) and Next (→) buttons. Search types include edge, pulse width, runt, logic, setup and hold, rise/fall time and I²C, SPI, CAN, LIN, RS232/422/485/UART packet content.