A range of oscilloscopes from Pico Technology is said to be suited to use by mainstream electronics design engineers. Called the PicoScope 3000D Series, the devices offer bandwidths of up to 200 MHz bandwidth, two or four analogue channels plus 16 digital channels on the mixed signal models. With memory sizes ranging from 64 to 512Msamples, the scopes offer a maximum real time sampling rate of 1Gsample/s and feature a USB 3.0 interface and a built-in arbitrary waveform generator.
"The deep memory on the PicoScope 3000D means that you can use long timebases with the fastest sampling rates," explained managing director Alan Tong. "Even at 1Gsample/s, you can capture a 500ms waveform –half a billion samples – while hardware acceleration keeps the display updating smoothly."
The buffer memory can be segmented, enabling acquisition of up to 10,000 individual waveform segments of 50,000 samples, with a rearm time of less than 1µs between each segment. Memory segmentation is said to be beneficial when analysing waveform bursts or serial data packets that include long gaps. PicoScope can be set to trigger on each packet and skip the gaps that are of no interest. This function allows users to acquire, for instance, CAN data packets over several minutes and then analyse the packet content later.
The new scopes benefit from the latest updates to the PicoScope software, including a new fast persistence mode that updates around 100,000 waveforms per second. Maths channels have also been expanded to include configurable filters.
Author
Graham Pitcher
Source: www.newelectronics.co.uk