Electronics Weekly puts its questions to an industry figure: Jay Alexander is the v-p and general manager of the oscilloscope business at Agilent Technologies. He reveals his thoughts about technical and commercial trends in the scope market.

1. What factors are determining the development of oscilloscopes?

Three trends are operating on the market and technology. First the need for serial data bus analysis, from physical measurements all the way up to protocol decoding; second, the general move from analogue to digital technologies where we are half way through a 20 to 30 year  mega-trend: and thirdly the growing importance of application-specific instruments. 

2. What is the future for the standalone bench-top oscilloscope with the growing use of PC-based systems?

The future for bench-top oscilloscopes is very strong. It is true that interest in PC-based products is growing at the lower end, but we still find that the oscilloscope is the home base for most measurements and customers value having an instrument with very fast responsiveness on the front panel. You do not get this in the PC form factor.

We do have a range of oscilloscopes with no front panel or screen. There is growing interest in this form factor in certain specialist applications such as defence systems, where there is a need for a high number of acquisition channels in a small amount of rack space.

3. With oscilloscopes offering real time bandwidths up to 12GHz, do you think you are approaching a practical physical limit for scope bandwidth?

No. The customers’ demand for greater bandwidth is still there, driven by serial data signalling especially, and we believe that we have the technology to go higher.   

4. What are the fastest growing oscilloscope markets around the world?

For high-end test systems it is the US and Japan. For mid-range products it is definitely Europe, which is being driven by wireless and automotive design, and for the low-end instruments it is China and other parts of Asia.

5. Will future oscilloscope product development be determined as much by software as by the hardware design?  

Hardware design will always be important to acquire the signal and to set the basic performance parameters but software is where the differentiation will increasingly be in the future.

As a result software intellectual property (IP) is of increasing importance to us and a measure of this is the increase in the number of software engineers we have employed for core measurements as well as application-specific products in the last 10 years.

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