Tektronix Mixed Signal Oscilloscopes Set New Benchmark for Performance and Usability

BEAVERTON, Ore., April 3 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Tektronix, Inc. , a leading worldwide provider of test, measurement and monitoring instrumentation, announced the availability of the MSO4000 Mixed Signal Oscilloscopes (MSO). The new MSO4000 family of mixed signal oscilloscopes combine three powerful capabilities -- an advanced real-time oscilloscope and logic analyzer, and the breakthrough Wave Inspector waveform search engine -- into one small and lightweight portable device for embedded design and debug. The MSO4000 provides a familiar oscilloscope front-panel and a stunning display, letting the engineer control everything intuitively but with only a fraction of the size and weight of other MSOs. It ushers in a new benchmark for performance and usability, providing uncompromised debug functionality that raises the bar for mixed signal oscilloscopes to its highest level yet.

Embedded systems are literally everywhere. Examples include cellular phones, automotive systems, avionics, network devices, industrial controls, and consumer electronics. Debugging an embedded design often requires viewing analog signal phenomena and the interaction of digital control signals. In this mixed signal environment, engineers cannot accurately predict the types of problems that will be uncovered during development. They need a test instrument with the ability to acquire both analog and digital signals and display them time-correlated on a single display. The new Tektronix MSO4000 combines leading oscilloscope and basic logic analyzer capabilities so that engineers can conveniently visualize and correlate analog and digital signals on a single instrument.

"Embedded system designers are often working with both analog and digital signals in their designs and need powerful yet easy-to-use test tools for both," said Bob Bluhm, Vice President and General Manager, Value Scope Product Line, Tektronix. "The new MSO4000 provides fully featured analog and digital channels, long-record length on all channels, the most powerful productivity tools including the largest display, Wave Inspector, and an industry-best price/performance. With many industry-best features beyond any MSO in the market today, the MSO4000 Series simplifies operation, ensures measurement confidence and are ideal for engineers needing to more efficiently design, debug, and test their embedded designs."

"Having both digital and analog channels and being able to see these together on the same large display makes the Tektronix MSO4000 perfect for the type of work we do with aviation applications," said Jacob Campbell, Design Engineer, Garmin AT, a subsidiary of Garmin International. "I can really get inside the components and see what's going on with test points on the device under test tied to the Tektronix MSO scope. I can do in the real world what I usually have to try to do in simulations. The features provided by this scope have made my job easier. Without question, the Tektronix MSO4000 is one of the most useful pieces of test equipment I have ever had."

Leading Performance

The MSO4000 oscilloscope family consists of four models ranging from 350 MHz to 1 GHz, with two or four analog channels and 16 digital channels to provide up to 20 time-correlated channels. The MSO4032 and MSO4034 provide bandwidth of 350 MHz on two and four analog channels respectively. The MSO4054 provides 500 MHz bandwidth across four analog channels and the MSO4104 offers 1 GHz bandwidth on the four analog channels. The MSO4104 provides 5 GS/s sampling on all channels while the other models provide 2.5 GS/s on all channels. All models come standard with 10M record length on all analog and digital channels.

The MSO4000 provides two methods for capturing digital waveform data. The main digital acquisition mode captures 10M points at 500 MS/s (2 ns resolution). The MSO4000 also provides MagniVu(TM) ultra high resolution signal acquisition technology that acquires 10,000 points at up to 16.5 GS/s (60.6 ps resolution). Both the main and MagniVu waveforms are acquired on every trigger and can be viewed at any time, running or stopped. MagniVu provides greater than eight times faster timing resolution than any other MSO on the market, instilling confidence when making critical timing measurements on digital channels.

"By combining excellent oscilloscope capabilities with basic logic analyzer features in the same time domain, the portable Tektronix MSO4000 addresses our needs for design verification and test," said Ryan Fisher, NAND Applications Engineer, Micron Technology. "The MSO4000 provides familiar oscilloscope operation, gives me the full system 'big picture' on one screen and meets our system development needs for NAND Flash memory used in many embedded designs. The fine resolution afforded by MagniVu has been a real asset in finding difficult to discover problems. The MSO4000 enables the engineering team at Micron Technology to more quickly find and solve problems."

Leading Ease of Use

The MSO4000 offers the groundbreaking Wave Inspector on all analog and digital channels, an unprecedented set of easy-to-use tools for discovery and efficient viewing, navigating, and analyzing waveform data. Managing up to 20 channels, each with 10M record length, has been dramatically simplified through automated waveform pan and zoom, user definable markers and intelligent search and find modes. All MSO4000 models provide a 10.4 inch, XGA color display, the largest and highest resolution display in its class. Not only is the MSO4000 the most capable oscilloscope in its segment of the market, at only 5.4 inches deep the MSO4000 is the shallowest on the market -- requiring less bench space than competing products -- and weighs only 11 pounds for easy portability.

The MSO4000 combines leading specifications, familiar operation, innovative troubleshooting capabilities, and comprehensive support for monitoring, triggering, and decoding parallel buses and the most common serial buses used in embedded design such as I2C, SPI, CAN, and RS-232. "The ability to decode buses, including parallel buses and RS232 signals, combined with the event viewer in the MSO4000 oscilloscope, is a tremendous help in debugging circuits," Campbell added. "These tools take care of the tedious work of decoding the bus manually and searching through the data to find the event in question. This means less time searching for the problem, leading to quicker solutions."

New P6516 Digital Probe

Along with the new MSO4000 oscilloscopes, Tektronix is introducing the P6516 digital probe. This unique probe design offers two eight channel pods that can each probe parts up to eight feet apart, facilitating the reach to multiple areas on a board with a single probe. Color-coding of the leads correlates the probe tips to the signal trace on the display. The sleek P6516 probe leads do not get tangled, making connecting to the device under test simple.

Pricing and Availability

U.S. MSRP for the MSO4000 range from $8,700 for the MSO4032 model to $17,200 for the MSO4104 model. One P6516 probe is included with each MSO4000 model purchased. All MSO4000 models are available for purchase and delivery.

About Tektronix

Tektronix is a leading supplier of test, measurement, and monitoring products, solutions and services for the communications, computer, and semiconductor industries -- as well as military/aerospace, consumer electronics, education and a broad range of other industries worldwide. With 60 years of experience, Tektronix enables its customers to design, build, deploy, and manage next-generation global communications networks, advanced and pervasive technologies. Headquartered in Beaverton, Oregon, Tektronix has operations in 19 countries worldwide. Tektronix' Web address is http://www.tektronix.com/.

Tektronix is a registered trademark of Tektronix, Inc. All other trade names referenced are the service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.