Agilent 5989-7885EN Waveform Update Rate Determines Probability of Capturing Elusive Events - Application No free download

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Keysight Technologies Oscilloscope Waveform Update Rate Determines Probability of Capturing Elusive Events Application Note Introduction How to Increase Your Odds of Finding Infrequent Glitches Although often overlooked when evaluating performance of various oscilloscopes for purchase, waveform update rates can be extremely important--sometimes just as important as the traditional banner specifications including bandwidth, sample rate, and memory depth. Even though a scope's waveform update rate may appear fast and lively when viewing repetitively captured waveforms on your scope's display, "fast" is relative. For example, a few thousand waveforms per second will certainly appear lively and fast, but statistically speaking this can be very slow if you are attempting to capture a random and infrequent event that may happen just once in a million occurrences of a signal. There are three reasons why fast update rates are important for today's oscilloscopes. First, if an oscilloscope updates waveforms very slowly, it can make using the oscilloscope very frustrating. If you rotate the timebase control, you expect the oscilloscope to respond immediately--not seconds later after the scope finishes processing data. Secondly, fast waveform update rates can improve oscilloscope display quality to show subtle waveform details such as noise and jitter with display intensity modulation. But most importantly, fast waveform update rates improve the scope's probability of capturing random and infrequent events that may be keeping you up late at night. The Keysight Technologies, Inc. InfiniiVision Series oscilloscopes not only provide the fastest waveform update rates when you use just the scope channels (up to 1,000,000 waveforms per second), but they also are the only MSOs in the industry that can maintain these fast update rates when you are using logic acquisition channels and/or serial bus decoding. Although other vendors may specify relatively fast banner waveform update rate specifications for their MSOs, when you use logic channels and/or serial bus decoding, these other scopes' update rates drop significantly. This application note includes side-by-side measurement examples that compare the probabilities of capturing an anomalous event using various vendors' MSOs. But let's first review some of the factors that impact oscilloscope update rates, and then we will show you how to compute probabilities of capturing infrequent events. 03 | Keysight | Oscilloscope Waveform Update Rate Determines Probability of Capturing Elusive Events- Application Note Understanding Oscilloscope Dead Time When you debug new designs, waveform and decode update particular setup condition used. The following equation rates can be critical--especially when you are attempting to