Digital scope targets emerging serial buses

The DL9040 SignalXplorer digital oscilloscope claims new price/performance standards for the 500MHz bandwidth market.

The new Yokogawa DL9040 SignalXplorer is a digital oscilloscope which sets new price/performance standards for the 500MHz bandwidth market.

With a price of only Eur 7777 (GBP 5555 in the UK), the new instrument is 20% lower in cost than other instruments in this bandwidth range - yet incorporates a number of advanced features that make it ideally suited to tests on I2C and other emerging serial bus technologies.

"We have identified the 500MHz sector as a major growth area in the oscilloscope market", says Terry Marrinan, Sales and Marketing Director, Europe and Africa: "And we believe that with the DL9040 we have the most cost-effective and versatile product for this market sector".

In common with the higher-bandwidth products in the Yokogawa DL9000 family, the new four-channel DL9040 combines high-speed waveform acquisition and advanced functions such as accumulation display mode and history memory with a compact and lightweight design.

It features a frequency bandwidth of 500MHz, a maximum sampling rate of 5Gsample/s on two channels and 2.5Gsample/s on four channels, and a maximum memory length of 2.5Mword per channel (6.25Mword on the DL9040L model).

The DL9040 features an enhanced waveform accumulation function which offers a choice of two high-speed signal acquisition modes: "N single" mode or accumulation mode.

"N single" mode captures up to 1600 waveforms on each of four channels with as little as 400ns of dead time between acquisitions, making it ideal for observing closely spaced waveform events consecutively.

In the 500ps/division range.

This corresponds to an effective acquisition rate of 2.5M waveforms per second per channel.

The accumulation mode is designed for observing long-term repetitive waveform events, and offers a repetitive signal acquisition rate of up to 25,000 waveforms per second per channel (on four channels simultaneously) while retaining up to 2000 acquisitions in memory.

The DL9040 incorporates a history memory function, in which the memory is partitioned to automatically accumulate and display up to 2000 waveform frames.

The combination of history memory with high-speed signal acquisition helps the user to avoid missing anomalies by allowing previously acquired waveforms to be viewed and analysed, even after the acquisition stops - offering unparalleled insight into waveform behaviour and making troubleshooting easier.

History replay allows the waveforms stored in memory to be replayed one by one.

The advanced memory handling capability allows users to select the most appropriate memory setting for a given measurement.

This means that both long and short memory records can be acquired and displayed quickly by saving the waveforms in the segmented memory, so that the user has all the benefits of a long memory oscilloscope regardless of the record size allocated for each acquisition.

Both zoom search and history search functions are available.

Zoom search locates an area of interest in a single acquisition, while history search locates any acquisitions in history memory that meet user-selected criteria.

The dot density display feature varies the intensity of individual display pixels depending on how often a signal illuminates each pixel.

Even for single-shot acquisitions, the dot density display provides visual information about the signal/noise ratio of a signal.

For repetitive signal acquisitions, this feature offers additional insight into the frequency of occurrence of portions of a signal over time, offering a waveform representation like that of an analogue oscilloscope.

For applications requiring high data security, the DL9040 can be configured without its optional internal hard disk drive, making it both easy and fast to securely erase all the data in the unit.

Measuring only 350 x 200 x 178mm and weighing only 6.5kg, the DL9040 is the smallest, most lightweight instrument in its class in terms of display and analysis performance.

Despite its sleek and narrow profile, it still incorporates an 8.4in LCD screen with a 1024 x 768 XGA display.

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