Rohde & Schwarz's R&S®RTO scope series enhances performance of embedded systems

May 3, 2011 - PRLog -- Rohde & Schwarz, a leading manufacturer of test & measurement, communications and broadcasting equipment, has developed the industry's only digital oscilloscope that employs a real-time digital trigger. Designated the R&S®RTO Series, the advanced scope significantly enhances productivity and product performance when debugging embedded systems.

The real-time digital trigger in the R&S®RTO Scope Series uses a common signal path for both the trigger and acquired data. This eliminates time and amplitude offset between the trigger and signal, enabling signals to be displayed with the least possible trigger jitter and allowing precise results to be achieved when measuring complex waveforms.

"Triggering in the digital domain has significant benefits. For example, analog triggers have significant trigger jitter because the analog trigger and signal acquisition paths run in parallel. As each path has different characteristics, the signal is displayed with time and amplitude offset relative to the actual trigger point. Even the most sophisticated post-processing can only partially compensate for the inevitable resulting measurement inaccuracy of this approach," said Mike Schnecker, Business Development Manger at Rohde & Schwarz.

Analog triggers typically have a long re-arm cycle, and while re-arming, the instrument cannot react to trigger events, which means signal properties that should act as triggers are masked. Because the R&S®RTO Scope Series' digital trigger does not need to re-arm, every sample can trigger data acquisition to avoid missing events.

In addition, errors in serial interfaces are often caused by sporadic signal faults at the physical layer, so high acquisition rates are essential in order to detect them. Since R&S®RTO Scope Series acquires and displays signals using hardware, blind time is minimized and errors are located quickly. Also, many embedded systems employ serial data interfaces to control external devices and simply viewing the waveform is not sufficient to fully debug the operation of these systems. The R&S®RTO features an integrated trigger and decode feature that allows users to trigger on protocol-specific features and to display the captured waveform in binary, ASCII or HEX formats. The trigger and decode feature supports SPI, I2C, CAN, LIN and RS232.