Peter Kasenbacher, European manager for the oscilloscope product lines at Agilent Technologies, talks to Electronics Weekly about the different ways in which oscilloscopes are used by the test engineer.
1. How would you characterise the upturn in the oscilloscope market in 2010?
I am enthusiastic about the opportunities ahead in oscilloscopes. I believe that ongoing innovation with new scope platforms is particularly important in this environment.
The supplier will benefit from offering a very broad scope portfolio, from hand-held up to highest performance lab scopes.
2. What are the main technology or functionality drivers in the oscilloscope market?
Customers each value something different, but I believe it is important for us to put a lot of effort into the most accurate representation of the actual customer signal, then couple this with features such as fast waveform update rate and software applications.
In the economy and general purpose area, we see more and more lab scope capabilities down-deployed into the more affordable platforms, while in the high-end area, the race continues to reach new performance/spec records - needed to support the latest serial design standards.
And it may surprise you, but sometimes it is also about “simple sounding” things like quiet fans or ease-of-use operation, which actually are challenges given performance in today’s instruments.
3. Have there been any important changes in the way oscilloscopes are used by the test engineer, if so in what ways?
Probably the biggest change is how much the scope can do for the test engineer particularly with its applications software.
Pre-determined test algorithms, compliance tests and jitter packages can cut the time the test engineer needs to spend setting up and making measurements and allows them to focus on the results they need to achieve.
On the other side, we see physicists and scientists outside the traditional electronics industries using off-the-shelf scopes as tool of choice versus developing custom acquisition systems.
Or thinking of communications customers, who meanwhile use digital tools on top of their traditional RF/microwave instruments, by taking advantage of the high bandwidth of a scope to digitise broadband communication signals and demodulate related to the wireless standards
4. What would you say to the comment that an oscilloscope is just a data acquisition device coupled to a PC running analysis software?
The test engineering world has changed quite a bit and while there are examples where customers use a scope as acquisition device with analysis software running either on a remote PC or in the scope itself, there are more important considerations about the value and contribution (inside) of a scope.
Think of the memory interface and speed with which the system interfaces to the acquisition. This is really a critical element to keeping the whole system usable.
So despite significant differentiation on the acquisition side, you can see considerable differentiation on our interfaces to the memory.
5. Which is the most exciting test market in 2010?
On the digital side, this is the year of the “3’s”. USB 3.0; PCI-E Gen 3 and SATA 3. These are key drivers for anyone doing next generation digital design.
We are also seeing quite a bit of interest in the wireline markets for test with 10G/40G/100G test systems.
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