Two types of oscilloscopes

Oscilloscopes can be divided into analog oscilloscopes and digital oscilloscopes. For most electronic applications, both analog oscilloscopes and digital oscilloscopes are capable of performing the task. However, for some specific applications, due to the different characteristics of analog oscilloscopes and digital oscilloscopes, there will be suitable and unsuitable applications.

Analog Oscilloscope

Analog oscilloscopes work by measuring the signal voltage directly, and the voltage is traced vertically by an electron beam that moves from left to right across the oscilloscope screen.

Digital Oscilloscope

The working mode of digital oscilloscope is to convert the measured voltage into digital information through analog-to-analog converter (ADC). Digital oscilloscope captures a series of sample values ​​of the waveform and stores the sample values. The storage limit is to determine whether the accumulated sample values ​​can depict the waveform. Then, the digital oscilloscope reconstructs the waveform.

Digital oscilloscopes can be divided into digital storage oscilloscopes (DSO), digital phosphor oscilloscopes (DPO) and sampling oscilloscopes.

To improve the bandwidth of analog oscilloscopes, oscilloscope tubes, vertical amplification and horizontal scanning are required. To improve the bandwidth of digital oscilloscopes, it is only necessary to improve the performance of the front-end A/D converter, and there are no special requirements for oscilloscope tubes and scanning circuits. In addition, digital oscilloscopes can make full use of memory, storage and processing, as well as multiple triggering and advance triggering capabilities. In the 1980s, digital oscilloscopes emerged suddenly and achieved many results. They are likely to completely replace analog oscilloscopes. Analog oscilloscopes have indeed retreated from the foreground to the background.