Analysis of the three giants in the oscilloscope industry: always imitated, never surpassed

"Every electronic engineer should have at least one oscilloscope", this conclusion is enough to prove that oscilloscopes are indispensable to electronic technology. In such a key market, people often refer to the leaders of the oscilloscope market as the Big Three, which are Tektronix, Agilent and LeCroy.

LeCroy oscilloscopes are known as the synonym of high-end oscilloscopes abroad, and are called "scientists' test instruments" and "nobles among oscilloscopes". They are the technological pioneers in the digital oscilloscope industry. Different from the broad product lines of Tektronix and Agilent, LeCroy has gradually focused on mid-to-high-end digital oscilloscopes since the birth of digital oscilloscopes in 1984. LeCroy only fully entered China in 2002, and its popularity in the low-end oscilloscope market in China is relatively low. However, LeCroy, which is known for its technology, has been making great strides in the high-end oscilloscope market in China in recent years with its technological advantages.

Focus

People who are familiar with the history of oscilloscopes always talk about LeCroy's "first" in the field of oscilloscopes. Since its inception, LeCroy has adhered to the business strategy of technological innovation and set the company's core value as "Instrument Innovator". It has continuously created one "first" after another in the field of oscilloscope technology research and development, always leading the trend of the times: in 1985, it launched the world's first long-memory digital oscilloscope, redefining long memory.

In 1987, the world's first digital oscilloscope with intelligent triggering was introduced; in 1990, the first modular oscilloscope with real-time sampling and customizable analysis; in 1996, the first to use color-graded persistence to display abnormal events; in 1997, the first oscilloscope dedicated to disk drive analysis; in 1999, the first desktop oscilloscope with a color display and comprehensive analysis capabilities; in 2002, the first digital oscilloscope with fully integrated serial data analysis capabilities; in 2004, the first large-screen, small-footprint general-purpose oscilloscope; in 2005, the first 100GHz sampling oscilloscope using Coherent Interleaved Sampling (CIS); in 2006, the first to offer low-speed serial triggering in a large-screen, ultra-thin instrument; in 2008, the first to offer a single-chip ADC with a sampling rate of up to 40GS/s, which still holds the world's fastest record; in 2009, the world's first oscilloscope with a bandwidth of 30GHz and a sampling rate of 80GS/s; In April 2010, LeCroy announced the successful development of 60GHz real-time oscilloscope technology. There are also some basic functions of oscilloscopes that are already familiar to engineers. In fact, they were invented by LeCroy. After being launched on the market, they were generally well received by customers and then copied by other companies, gradually becoming the standard configuration of oscilloscopes. These functions include: glitch triggering, FFT analysis of signal spectrum characteristics, sequential sampling mode (also known as segmented mode), parameter measurement statistics, histograms, trend charts and tracking, multi-pane waveform display, real-time eye diagram generation (different from multiple sampling overlaps to form an eye diagram), and ADC manufacturing using silicon germanium technology.

Technology itself is a formidable competitive advantage, especially in high-tech industries. Regarding the technical advantages of oscilloscopes, LeCroy often says, "Always imitated, never surpassed." Mr. Wang Jinjin, Marketing Manager of Teledyne LeCroy in China, is familiar with the technological innovation history of Teledyne LeCroy. He said, "In 2006, Teledyne LeCroy invented the virtual detection and equalizer simulation technology - Eye Doctor. Three years later, competitors came up with similar technologies, but the performance difference is not achieved overnight in the eyes of experts. In 2005, Teledyne LeCroy invented the DBI technology, and competitors attacked it as much as they could. But in 2010, one of the competitors finally came up with DBI. It is said that another one will also come up with it, but it may take longer. If we trace the history back to 2000, Teledyne LeCroy first used the DSP boost method to increase the bandwidth and increase the oscilloscope bandwidth to 2GHz. But in the end, Teledyne LeCroy believed that this method would bring too many problems to the signal fidelity in principle and it was insurmountable. But it was not until 2004 that competitors came up with DSP boost and have been using this technology that Teledyne LeCroy abandoned in 2002. If we recall the history of digital oscilloscopes, we are surprised to find that almost every major invention and innovation in the oscilloscope industry originated from LeCroy! "

The oscilloscope market is full of smoke

Among all general electronic measuring instruments, oscilloscopes have the largest market share, which also determines that the market competition in the oscilloscope field is the most intense. Even in such a fierce market, high-end oscilloscopes are limited by high technical barriers, and only a few companies have been able to participate in it. Over the years, a competition pattern has been formed in which LeCroy, Tektronix, and Agilent have divided the world into three parts. In the short term, this pattern will continue. The competition situation in the low-end market has also entered a relatively stable state. In addition to the three major manufacturers, Japan's Yokogawa Corporation and China's Puyuan Precision Electronics have strong competitiveness. In addition, there are some manufacturers at home and abroad, mainly in Japan and Taiwan, who are fighting in the field of low-end handheld oscilloscopes. With the rapid development of the domestic electronics industry and the improvement of the quality of engineers, local users have become more and more rational and professional in their choice of oscilloscopes. For oscilloscope manufacturers, the era of selling products with just a few digital indicators or brand awareness is gone forever. In the final analysis, the key to market competition now is comprehensive strength, specifically products, services and marketing. Products are real things, which are determined by the technical strength of manufacturers. The key to product competition is the integration of technology and market segmentation. The high price of high-end products must bring high value to customers, which requires that the products must integrate multiple technical advantages to protect users' long-term investment. The price demands of highly professional industry users require manufacturers to focus more on the segmentation of market applications. Such users do not need a powerful "all-round" oscilloscope, but only an oscilloscope that meets specific applications, and price is an important consideration.

As a company that started with high-end analytical instrument technology, the biggest difference between LeCroy and Agilent and Tektronix in market positioning is that LeCroy focuses more on the research and development of the high-end oscilloscope market. Wang Jinjin believes that it is worth being proud of that the understanding and grasp of this market difference has allowed LeCroy's products to always be in a leading position in the industry. For example, the fourth-generation oscilloscope incorporates a lot of creative designs in the integration of multiple functions, and through the segmentation of market applications, LeCroy has established its monopoly in multiple industry fields, such as the vehicle bus analyzer product (VBA) launched for the automotive electronics field, the disk data analyzer (DDA) launched for the magnetic storage industry, and the EMC solution launched for electromagnetic compatibility analysis, etc. These are all achievements made by LeCroy in market segmentation. Service is determined by the company's business philosophy. LeCroy is a company that started with engineers and scientists, so its business philosophy is to help engineers and scientists solve some of the problems they encounter, rather than just an operating financial platform. Therefore, LeCroy's service concept is also centered on helping customers solve problems. The advantages of both products and services have made LeCroy stronger in the fierce competition. The increasing market share of LeCroy in China is the most convincing evidence. Finally, from the marketing perspective, this is the direction LeCroy is working towards compared to its other two major competitors. The company is making some positive changes, such as optimizing the direct sales team, forming a new distribution management team, setting up a dedicated marketing team, and strengthening communication and exchanges with customers through various means. These efforts will not only strengthen marketing, but will also have a positive impact on LeCroy's brand building and market awareness. I believe time will prove it.

In particular, the first feature of LeCroy's fourth-generation oscilloscope WaveMaster 8 Zi is the best signal fidelity of the front-end amplifier. It has the flattest amplitude-frequency characteristic curve, the smallest jitter noise floor, the highest time base accuracy, and three unique step response modes. The second feature is the fastest operation response speed, signal processing speed and waveform transmission speed. As an instrument for human-computer interaction, the response speed of the oscilloscope directly affects the user experience of engineers. The response speed of the fourth-generation oscilloscope is more than 10 times faster than that of the same oscilloscope. High-end oscilloscopes are different from data acquisition cards. Engineers need oscilloscopes to gain insight into signals, not just capture signals and run user-developed software on the PC for offline analysis. After the launch of the fourth-generation oscilloscope, LeCroy has been emphasizing a concept called "analyzable storage depth". When measuring eye diagrams, LeCroy oscilloscopes can form an eye diagram of 1 million bits in 2 seconds. The advantage is that when customers test 16 pairs of PCI-E Gen2 signals, it takes two days to complete the test using other brands of oscilloscopes, but only two hours with LeCroy. The third feature is the unique DoubleScan function (including TriggerScan and WaveScan). The combination of these two Scan functions enables LeCroy oscilloscopes to have extremely strong capabilities to locate and analyze abnormal signals. In addition, the fourth-generation oscilloscopes also have a series of "most", "only" and "unique" performance indicators that represent LeCroy's innovative capabilities, such as the most trigger modes, the only one that can provide optical signal testing solutions, the unique dual input interface mode, the only one that can support 128Mpts FFT operations, etc.

Focus on leading technological innovation

The focused product strategy, inherited from the technical foundation of high-energy physics analysis, allows LeCroy to stand at the forefront of oscilloscope technology development. The technological progress of oscilloscopes is the result of the development of the electronics industry, because they are all made of the most excellent electronic device architecture of the same era, and at the same time, they themselves have strongly promoted the progress of electronic technology. Engineers can only continuously improve product performance with the help of oscilloscopes. The technological development of oscilloscopes also follows the principle of "higher, faster, stronger".

The three companies are competing to pursue higher bandwidth, faster sampling rate and stronger analysis ability of oscilloscopes. This pursuit of "higher, faster and stronger" stems from the rapid development of science and technology. The core technology of oscilloscopes mainly consists of two aspects: the ability to capture signals is mainly three indicators, and the second is the signal analysis ability. These two aspects are exactly the focus of LeCroy's research and development. Driven by Moore's Law, the bandwidth of oscilloscopes is constantly improving. Theoretical predictions show that the bandwidth of oscilloscopes will double every three years. In the past ten years, the highest bandwidth was 2GHz in 2000, 6GHz in 2002, 13GHz in 2004, 20GHz in 2007, and 30GHz in 2009. LeCroy predicts that the bandwidth will reach 50GHz in 2011, 63GHz in 2012, 80GHz in 2013, and 100GHz in 2014. The technology of sampling rate and storage depth is also constantly breaking through. LeCroy will lead the progress of this basic and core technology that represents the highest level of semiconductor technology for a long time.

Wang Jinjin introduced that when LeCroy's 30GHz bandwidth was first released, many people questioned where the market was. But soon many companies bought 30GHz oscilloscopes. LeCroy's 30GHz real-time oscilloscope WaveMaster 830Zi is used to measure 224Gb/s PM-QPSK signals with 56Gb/s per channel, which is a key step in accelerating the availability of 200G transmission technology and surpassing long-distance dense wavelength division multiplexing networks (DWDM).

High-speed serial testing

The market driving force for the development of electronic measurement and testing technology mainly comes from the communications, computer and consumer electronics industries. With the rapid development of electronic information technology, the information age has continuously increased the speed of information transmission, which in turn brings about stringent requirements for high-speed data transmission testing. It is certain that the measurement and analysis of high-speed signals will continue to be a hot spot in the market in the next one or two years. In the past, engineers mainly used oscilloscopes for the measurement and verification of electrical signals, such as fault diagnosis of electronic systems, but with the widespread popularity of high-speed serial buses and the application of new generation serial bus standards, such as the HDMI1.3 bus widely used in consumer electronics and computers, and PCIe-G2 and SATA3.0 widely used in industrial products, users will have a stronger demand for high-speed bus consistency testing than before. The application of high-speed buses has also brought unprecedented challenges to the design and debugging of new products. Engineers need to consider signal integrity and power integrity, the impact of PCB routing on high-speed signal differential pairs, bit error rate and jitter tolerance testing at the receiving end, etc. In addition to the physical layer, the analysis of the protocol layer may also be considered. These new challenges require engineers to have a complete set of solutions to cope with the test requirements they bring. For example, in addition to a high-performance oscilloscope, a protocol analyzer, a TDR, or even a network analyzer and a signal source may be required. The good news is that LeCroy provides a complete solution for these test challenges. For the testing of next-generation serial buses, such as USB3.0, SATA3.0, and PCIE-G3, LeCroy is the only manufacturer that can provide a complete test solution from the physical layer to the protocol layer, from the transmitter to the receiver, and from problem discovery to problem solving. "As for the longer term in the future, from high-speed signal testing to RF signal testing, from wired application testing to wireless application testing, I think this is almost the future development trend of the entire electronic measurement industry." Wang Jinjin said.

From the application trend, the biggest hot spot is the measurement and analysis of 5Gbit/s+ signals. The speed of serial bus has been generally upgraded from about 2.5Gbit/s to more than 5Gbit/s. The speed of PCI-Express, a popular bus in the PC industry, has transitioned from PCI-Express 1.0 to PCI-Express 2.0, doubling the speed from 2.5Gb/s to 5Gbit/s. In the near future, it will transition to PCI-Express 3.0 of 8Gbit/s. The SATA bus will also be generally upgraded to SATA3.0's 6Gbit/s speed. The most popular USB3. bus has increased tenfold from 480Mbit/s to 5Gbit/s. In the communications industry, the most common XAUI interface signal speed has been upgraded from 3.125Gbit/s to 6.25Gbit/s. We need to welcome the arrival of the 5Gbit/s+ era. The specialty of LeCroy oscilloscopes is that they can bring engineers confident signal insights. The challenges of test and measurement in the 5Gbit/s+ era are even greater, and it is precisely the new and greatest opportunity for LeCroy to lead the high-end market. What are the design and test measurement challenges brought by higher speeds? For example, the eye diagram measurement requirements for 1 million UI continuous bits, and even the eye diagram measurement requirements under 10 to the 12th power sample; the power integrity design and measurement of low-voltage power supply solutions; the design of reference clocks and the measurement of clock jitter; the impact and measurement analysis of PCB routing design, connector design, pre-emphasis design, spread spectrum clock design, etc. on signal quality; the impact and measurement analysis of crosstalk between multiple high-speed differential pairs. In particular, as the signal rate increases, the "consumable" jitter margin becomes smaller and smaller, and high-precision jitter measurement becomes more and more important. How to evaluate the impact of the probe's load effect on the measurement? How to achieve "virtual detection"? The eye diagram of the receiving end is close to closed, so how to get the eye diagram after the chip is internally equalized? How to measure signal quality before the PCB is put into board to shorten the R&D cycle? Why does the bit error rate and jitter tolerance test of the receiving end become a necessary measurement? These design and measurement challenges are where LeCroy oscilloscopes can help engineers, and are what distinguishes LeCroy from other oscilloscopes.

Convergence and the future of the Chinese market

Integration and segmentation have always been two directions of industrial development. These two directions also exist in the instrument industry. The benefit of integration is that one instrument can do several jobs. The benefit of segmentation may be that the price of a single instrument is cheaper, and the other may be that the technical performance can be more focused. In the future, it is not ruled out that the acquisition and display parts will be separated in the high-end field. Oscilloscopes seem to be more likely to develop in the direction of "integration". However, the functional evolution of oscilloscopes is inseparable from the five basic functions of oscilloscopes: capturing signals, observing signals, measuring signals, analyzing signals, and archiving signals. In terms of signal analysis, modern oscilloscope software functions are becoming more and more abundant, and the signal analysis is more in-depth. For example, oscilloscopes did not support I2C, SPI, CAN Bus triggering and decoding before, but now they can. They did not support channel simulation before, but now they can. Oscilloscopes did not have any protocol analysis function before, but now they can even perform PCI-Express protocol layer analysis. Originally, oscilloscopes could only capture 4 analog signals at most, but now they can capture 36 digital signals. This has "created" the mixed signal oscilloscope market, which can replace low-end logic analyzers, and even has better indicators than logic analyzers. LeCroy's fourth-generation oscilloscope integrates spectrum analysis software, which partially replaces the function of spectrum analyzers. In the future, if the ADC of oscilloscopes can reach more than 8 bits, it will completely replace spectrum analyzers. All current oscilloscopes have FFT analysis functions, but this function is just a "decoration" on many oscilloscopes. In addition to being limited by ADC resolution, it is also limited by the lack of sufficient computing power of the oscilloscope. Only part of the captured data can be analyzed by FFT, and the frequency resolution ⊿f is very large. LeCroy's fourth-generation oscilloscope has made another breakthrough in signal analysis capabilities. The storage depth of FFT that can be analyzed has reached 128Mpts, which is an important step in integrating time domain and frequency domain instruments. Oscilloscopes of other brands are still at the level of only being able to do 3.2Mpts FFT. Will the signal source be integrated into the oscilloscope in the future? It is still unknown at the moment, but the development of technology essentially comes from market demand, and sometimes manufacturers seem to be more capable of creating a "blue ocean".

As for LeCroy's future strategy in the Chinese market, Wang Jinjin quoted Li Sui, general manager of LeCroy China, on the Chinese market and LeCroy's China strategy:

"We are very happy to see that China's economy has recovered from the financial crisis earlier than the rest of the world and is growing strongly. Among LeCroy's three main customer groups, government research institutes have been able to continue to grow due to the country's investment in technology transformation, including aerospace, military industry, and national defense. It still drives the demand for test instruments from these government research institutes and some colleges and universities. Later, we are also pleased to see that the local manufacturing industry facing the domestic market has recovered earlier than those manufacturers facing the overseas market. Now, multinational companies have also shown strong growth momentum. This provides market conditions for our growth in China. LeCroy has provided internal conditions for its growth in China, from the launch of the 7Zi series in 2008 to the launch of the 8Zi series in 2009, to the maximum bandwidth of 30GHz, to the recently announced 60GHz bandwidth technology. The series of reform measures implemented by LeCroy's Chinese team in the past two years have turned the market and products into a reality of LeCroy's sales growth in China for eight consecutive quarters: LeCroy's sales in East China have almost doubled, and LeCroy has also achieved a series of breakthroughs in the PC industry. In 2010 and 2011, LeCroy will continue to improve its three-dimensional, multi-level sales and service system, strengthen market publicity and brand building, so that more Chinese engineers can understand and use LeCroy oscilloscopes that can really solve problems for engineers. "