Rohde & Schwarz have developed what is claimed to be the industry's only digital oscilloscopes that offer real-time digital triggering. Designated the R&S RTO series, the advanced scopes aim to significantly enhance productivity and product performance for debugging embedded systems.

The real-time digital trigger function in the R&S RTO scope series shares the same data path as the acquired signal data. This eliminates time and amplitude offsets between the trigger and signal data, thereby minimising trigger jitter in the signal display and allowing precise results to be obtained when measuring complex waveforms.

Analogue trigger circuits typically have long re-arm times, and the instrument cannot respond to trigger events during this time. As a result, signal properties that should act as triggers are masked. The digital trigger logic of the R&S RTO scope series has zero re-arm time, so every signal sample can trigger data acquisition without any missed event. In addition, errors in serial data interfaces often arise from sporadic faults at the physical level, which means that high acquisition rates are essential in order to detect them.

The R&S RTO scopes acquire and display signals using hardware, which minimises blind time and allows errors to be located quickly. Furthermore, many embedded systems use serial data interfaces to control external devices, and simply viewing signal waveforms is not sufficient to properly debug these systems. The R&S RTO scopes feature an integrated trigger and decode function that allows users to trigger on protocol-specific features and to display the captured waveform in binary, ASCII or HEX format. This trigger and decode function supports SPI, I2C, CAN, LIN and RS232 interface protocols.

 

Image: Rohde & Schwarz