Highly flexible PC-connected oscilloscopes for mixed-signal measurement

RS Components has availability of a series of PC-based oscilloscopes manufactured by Pico Technology. The extremely flexible PicoScope 5000D series of PC-based oscilloscopes and mixed-signal oscilloscopes (MSO) provide leading performance with up to 16-bit vertical resolution, up to 200MHz bandwidth and 1GS/s sampling speed. Offering two and four-channel models in the range, the devices are designed to be connected to PCs and integrate the high-speed USB 3.0 connection to allow waveform data to be saved quickly. The company’s FlexRes flexible-resolution technology enables users to reconfigure the product’s hardware to be either a fast oscilloscope for digital signals or a high-resolution device for audio work and other analogue applications. The products use multiple high-resolution ADCs at the inputs in different time-interleaved and parallel combinations to set the sampling rate up to a maximum 1GS/s at 8-bit resolution or down to 62.5MS/s at 16-bit resolution. The MSO models in the range add up to 16 digital channels and the ability to time-correlate analogue and digital channels with high accuracy. These channels can be grouped and displayed as a bus with each value displayed in binary, hex, decimal or level. Also, advanced triggers can also be set across both analogue and digital channels. An additional key feature of the 5000D series is deep capture memory, which produces up to 512 Msamples and enables the capture of long-duration waveforms at maximum sampling speed. The company’s integrated DeepMeasure tool analyses every cycle in each triggered waveform acquisition and displays the results in a table. The latest tool version includes 12 parameters per cycle and can display up to a million cycles. The series also delivers wide support for a wide range of protocols including CAN, FlexRay, I2C, I2S, SPI, Ethernet, USB, MODBUS and DMX512 for various applications in the automotive, embedded, industrial and lighting market sectors. The PicoSDK software development kit also allows users to write their own applications and supports continuous streaming to a host computer at up to 125MS/s.