Tektronix Boosts Speed of Oscilloscopes

By DE Editors

Tektronix, Inc. has announced the release of new firmware for the DPO7000, DPO/DSA70000, and DPO/DSA70000B Series oscilloscopes that the company says can provide up to 20 times throughput improvements for all measurements and applications using finite impulse response (FIR) filters. The most notable performance gains are realized when processing long record length waveforms with FIR filtering enabled, as required for many high-speed serial data analysis applications.   

The DPO/DSA70000B Series oscilloscopes offer high signal fidelity with scalable performance up to 20GHz.  This level of performance is necessary for testing high-speed third generation serial bus architectures. The new firmware further extends their capabilities by reducing the time needed to perform crucial measurements.

The new firmware offers gains in a number of areas. It improves the performance for popular application packages such as Jitter Analysis, HDMI, and Ethernet compliance testing. The level of performance improvement scales with filter settings and the length of the waveforms to be processed. For example, the time to apply the filter in the Serial Data Link Analysis (SDLA) application for a 20M record length went from 1 minute to 3 seconds, according to Tektronix.

The firmware upgrades are available as a free download from Tektronix for all current DPO7000, DPO/DSA70000, and DPO/DSA70000B users.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company's website.