Hancock, Johnnie

Testing and characterizing the perfor-mance of switch mode power supplies (SMPS) and linear DC-to-DC converters requires a broad range of special power-related measurements. For years, power supply designers have been using stan-dard bench top oscilloscopes to perform these measurements manually. Today however, many oscilloscope vendors offer licensed power measurement options that can perform many of the required mea-surements automatically for you.

Although real-time bandwidth will almost always be the number one criteria when it comes to selecting an oscilloscope to debug designs, waveform update rate is the most important characteristic of a scope that contributes to a scope’s ability to reveal random and infrequent events. Agilent’s InfiniiVision 4000 X-Series oscilloscopes update waveforms as fast as 1,000,000 waveforms per second making these scopes the masters at showing you the «needle-in-a-haystack» troublesome waveform.

A fundamental aspect of the curriculum of nearly all of today’s University Electrical Engineering programs are hands-on teaching labs. The test equipment that you will find in these entrylevel EE teaching labs typically includes oscilloscopes, multimeters, power supplies, and function generators. But the core instrument that students use to test and verify assigned analog and digital experiments is usually the oscilloscope. As private and government investments in science and technology education have increased in the last decade, some oscilloscope vendors, including Agilent Technologies, have begun to shift resources from developing just higher performance DSOs to developing scopes that meet the tighter budget requirements of EE departments.

With growth of transfer speed and complexity of the signals used in automobile electronics, the opportunity to check the integrity and accuracy of synchronization of signals is necessary for developers of the built-in systems. The most convenient instrument for such measurements is the oscilloscope. An Agilent advanced FlexRay test system, including a mixed signals oscilloscope and FlexRay protocol tester, uses strengths of both instruments. This new measuring decision allows to carry out the crucial FlexRay measurements inaccessible for today in other oscilloscopes

Design engineers have traditionally used both oscilloscopes and logic analyzers to test and debug mixed-signal embedded designs based on either microcontrollers (MCUs) and/or digital signal processors (DSPs). This article showed how a mixed signal oscilloscope (MSO) can be used to more effectively and efficiently turn on and debug embedded mixed-signal designs.