Defining the Standard

Product category: Board-Level Instruments
News Release from: Pico Technology | Subject: PicoScope
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial Team on 18 November 2002

Display modes add
functionality to PC-based scopes

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Pico Technology has added five multicycle persistence display modes to all 10 of its PC-based oscilloscopes

The new display modes are available free of charge in the latest version of PicoScope - Pico's popular combined oscilloscope, spectrum analyser and meter software - and can be downloaded from the company's website The five multicycle persistence display modes are: digital colour persistence; analogue intensity; average; min, max and current; and min, max and average.

All display modes provide enhanced representations of how signals change with respect to time/conditions and allow the user to identify trends.

Alan Tong, Pico Technology's Technical Director, says: "The addition of these display modes boosts the performance of PicoScope running on PCs connected to any of our scope and spectrum analyser products.

Free to download from our web site, PicoScope now has the display features you'd expect to find only on top-end, bench-top DSOs".

The digital colour mode is ideal for spotting intermittent glitches in digital signals.

Densely populated areas of the trace are coloured red (hot) and sparsely populated areas of the trace are coloured blue (cold).

The analogue intensity mode emulates the phosphor display of a conventional analogue oscilloscope and is useful for displaying complex analogue signals (such as video waveforms and analogue modulation signals).

Average shows the average of all cycles, which is useful for removing random noise from the current trace.

Using the min, max and current mode a shaded area represents the range (minimum and maximum) of all cycles.

The trace within the shaded area is the current signal.

This mode is ideal for measuring the time jitter of signals such as clock waveforms.

Using the min, max and average mode a shaded area represents the range (minimum and maximum) of all cycles.

The trace within the shaded area represents the average.

As with average mode, random noise has been removed.

Because PicoScope is a PC-based soft (or 'virtual') instrument, it makes full use of the PC's large colour display - making the viewing of traces far easier than with traditional benchtop oscilloscopes (which tend to have small CRT or LCD displays).

Screen shots can easily be captured in PicoScope and saved to disk - for use in reports/manuals or for sending to colleagues.

In addition to the five multicycle persistence modes, PicoScope's single-cycle operation now includes a filtered mode that removes high-frequency noise.

Tong concludes: "PicoScope's new multicycle display modes and its single cycle filtering will greatly aid test and measurement in all fields of engineering".

(This was Electronicstalk's Top Story on 18 November 2002)

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