Company: Tektronix
Category: Test, Measurement & Inspection Product of the Year
How does TekScope make a significant impact on the market?
Systems development is becoming more complex, with many team members distributed across geographies, functional areas of expertise and even between partners and suppliers. Many manufacturers are therefore looking for test tools that help them work more collaboratively, making it easier to share results and data between their various teams and partners. With many engineers also now working away from their normal development environment, there is a demand for remote access to test equipment, yet retaining the advanced tools and features that they are accustomed to.
Their needs range from easy ways to share data, the ability to run measurements outside the lab, and methods to correlate lab measurements with simulation results. At Tektronix, we kept our customer-centric ethos at the core to develop an innovative product that would support engineers with these aspects.
The TekScope software meets the needs outlined by allowing the engineer to process, analyze, and share data efficiently, without having to be physically next to an oscilloscope or in the testing environment. Designed for ease of operation alongside other standard tools, TekScope software allows faster correlation and insight.
One of the major challenges facing developers is producing test applications that can support many oscilloscope channels at once. This increases development times and leads to extended time to market. TekScope software solves this challenge by making it easy to add more channels to an existing testing environment while setting the multi-scope system to behave as one unit. For developers, this saves time analyzing many channels from different oscilloscopes and attempting to synchronize them.
Customers also wanted high resolution to catch very fast glitches across many channels at once. The multi-scope analysis feature on TekScope meets this need. TekScope allows users to perform sophisticated analysis away from the lab, with capabilities including serial decode, power analysis, as well as timing, eye and jitter analysis.
Throughout our long history, we have always taken pride in ensuring continuity and convenience for our customers with all of our products and TekScope is no different. Users can take data from their oscilloscopes and continue their work anywhere, while easily sharing analysis results with their peers; a prime benefit in a world where the global COVID-19 pandemic drastically alters how and where engineers work.
How does TekScope demonstrate exceptional performance and innovation?
Building on our extensive experience in the industry, we developed the TekScope to provide engineers with the ability to corelate data easily from multiple oscilloscopes, share results with colleagues and produce reports summarizing analyses.
With the multi-scope license, engineers can view and analyze real-time data from up to 32 channels on up to four scopes, including other vendors’ products, at the same time from one place. By using the software to connect to multiple scopes and aggregate the data into a single place, engineers can now debug multiple channels simultaneously more easily and conveniently.
The Multi-Scope Analysis solution enables remote control of the acquisition settings on all oscilloscopes simultaneously, without the need to set up each oscilloscope individually. This allows very fast glitches to be caught in high resolution across many channels at the same time. Once the data is acquired and captured on TekScope, measurements and analysis can be run across all channels from different oscilloscopes at once.
The possibility of remote connection to oscilloscopes allows the acquisition of data directly from the oscilloscope in real time. This saves time for test engineers by eliminating the need to travel to the lab, making data available at the desk, at home or while traveling. Users can easily rearrange channel information, stack group, zoom, and add cursors or measurements, all while sharing with colleagues.
Offline analysis also allows waveform fields to be analyzed from any location without an internet connection.
Most oscilloscopes on the market measure only on the first cycles of the waveform. By contrast, the TekScope measurement system allows measurements on all occurrences in the record, giving more measurement insights from all other waveforms and from other oscilloscopes. TekScope can generate statistics from a single waveform rather than requiring multiple waveforms.
TekScope also offers two options for waveform viewing, either overlay mode or stacked mode, with simple toggling possible between the two modes. For example, when looking at edge crossings between two data signals, overlay mode may be preferred. As the number of waveforms grows, stacked mode may be more useful.
Other scenarios require the evaluation of waveforms and plot data, including eye diagrams, spectrums, bathtub plots, or histograms. Plots can be viewed in the same window as the waveform or, where additional screens are needed, a group of plots can be created and displayed on a second monitor. Within the group of plots, the user can customise the layout by simply dragging and dropping the plots within the display.
One of the challenges when taking lab measurements is how to correlate between instrumentation and simulation. Differences between the two are often related to a difference in measurement algorithms.
Our technical expertise has enabled us to meet this challenge with the development of the TekScope. This pioneering product allows the user to import multiple waveform formats from different sources, such a .wfm, .isf, and .tss, .csv, .bin, .trc, and .tr0. This allows the use of common analysis tools. For example, the user can simultaneously compare a waveform captured in the lab with a simulated waveform or one from a different oscilloscope.
The software also allows users to augment their scopes with additional analysis capabilities.
After completion of the analysis, a report can be generated to share or archive. Reports can include plots or configuration details, allowing the user to specify the information in the report. Reports can be archived as an .mht or .pdf file. A complete test report includes setup details, measurement configuration and results, and plots.
