TDS4000B Series DPO Scopes
Data Analysis

Data Magnified 25X... Zoom Position 48,64000

Serial Triggering and Analysis

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. In addition, there’s a large supply of off-the-shelf building block components from reputable manufacturers, enabling rapid design development. While serial buses have a large number of bene-fits, they also present that their predecessors (parallel buses) did not face. They make debugging bus and system problems more difficult, it’s harder to isolate events of interest and it’s more difficult to interpret what is displayed on the oscilloscope screen.

The DPO4000 Series addresses these problems and represents the ultimate tool for engineers working with low-speed serial buses such as I2C, SPI and CAN.

 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.

Trigger on packet content such as start of packet, specific addresses, specific data content, unique identifiers, etc., on popular low-speed serial interfaces such as I2C, SPI and CAN. 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! Once you’ve set up a bus, the oscilloscope will decode each packet on the bus, and display the value in either hex or binary in the bus waveform.

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 listed consecutively with columns for each component (Address, Data, etc.).

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 DPO4000 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 Prev and Next buttons on the front panel.

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