Using Oscilloscopes for High-Speed ​​Digital System Design and Debug

Choosing a good system development and debugging assistant can help embedded system development engineers speed up the product development cycle. By better observing the details and changes of circuit signals and capturing abnormal conditions in the circuit, an objective and complete analysis of the entire system can be made. Every embedded system development engineer hopes to have a high-performance and powerful oscilloscope as their development and debugging assistant.

At present, the signal transmission rate of the digital signal circuit of the embedded system ranges from tens of kHz to hundreds of MHz. In order to develop products with faster response and more powerful functions, people have been constantly improving the signal processing speed and transmission rate. For example, the DSP of ADI's Blackfin series has a maximum core clock frequency of 600MHz and a system clock of 400MHz. When transmitting data at the I/O port, although designers will consider the noise and stability of data transmission and usually do not use the extreme frequency, in order to increase the data transmission speed, the transmission rate of 100MHz ~ 300MHz is increasingly being used.

Faced with the current situation of higher and higher transmission speeds, the 60MHz ~ 200MHz bandwidth oscilloscopes provided in the test field are a little stretched. RIGOL recently launched the DS1000A series of oscilloscopes with a bandwidth of 300MHz, a sampling rate of 2GSps, and a waveform capture rate of 2000wfm/s, which can well meet the requirements of the test environment.

It meets the current testing needs of digital circuits. Its price remains at the level of mid-range oscilloscopes, making it an oscilloscope with outstanding cost-effectiveness in the world.

When choosing an oscilloscope, in addition to the performance indicators that digital circuit development engineers should pay attention to, the trigger function, connection function, archiving and analysis function of the oscilloscope are becoming more and more prominent as a good debugging assistant.

Engineers hope to be able to capture waveforms in a variety of ways. In addition to the usual edge trigger, some advanced trigger functions, such as pulse width trigger, slope trigger, video trigger, alternating trigger, etc., can help engineers capture specific and more interesting waveforms. For example, using pulse width trigger can help engineers find narrow pulses that occasionally appear in bus signal transmission, thereby discovering the cause of data transmission errors.

Convenient measurement functions can help engineers quickly obtain various parameter information of waveforms, usually such as frequency, amplitude, rise time, duty cycle, etc. The random FFT analysis function can help analyze waveform signals in the frequency domain.

In order to facilitate communication, storage and analysis, a good oscilloscope must also have the function of saving screen images and waveform data. With a USB flash drive, these waveform data can be easily copied to a PC for analysis, statistics and data communication.

Although RIGOL's DS1000A is a mid-range oscilloscope, it has many functions of high-end oscilloscopes, including complete trigger, measurement and analysis functions, and rich connection interfaces, including USB Device, USB Host, RS232, etc. These functions can better help high-speed digital circuit engineers to implement design solutions and conduct circuit debugging and analysis. In addition, RIGOL's DS1000 series oscilloscopes have achieved seamless interconnection and waveform reproduction technology with RIGOL DG series signal generators, providing digital circuit system design engineers with more ideal system analysis, testing and debugging solutions.