Rigol USA

Viewing Signals: How Rigol Products Raise the Bar

Viewing signals is the 1^st order value of an Oscilloscope.

The vast majority of oscilloscope users are primarily concerned with how the product displays signals. RIGOL Technologies has invested engineering and materials in a way to provide the best viewing scopes in their respective class of products.

Our view of oscilloscope especially those that cost < $2000 USD are that viewing is critical and comprises 3 aspects in order to create a superior scope for troubleshooting and basic waveform observation. These three are:

1. Acquisition – You must have enough performance to accurately capture the signal. The acquisition is often looked at in terms of Bandwidth and sample rate.
1. RIGOL has designed a variety of front end signal conditioning circuits optimized for different bandwidths. Out highest bandwidth today is 300 MHz which is the highest bandwidth performance in products under $2000 USD.
2. Sample rate is sometimes confused based on different manufacturer’s current capabilities. So what are the facts?
1. If you acquiring a signal only once i.e. single shot, you must have more than 2 times the sample rate as the bandwidth. This is according to Nyquist theorem and implies many perfect conditions not possible in the real world, thus you need > 2 times the higher bandwidth.
2. Certain manufacturers would want you to believe you need 10 times the sample rate of the bandwidth of the scope. While this may be a nice thing to have, it is based more on a manufacturer’s current technology than any real need to accurately acquiring and displaying the signal under test.
3. In reality, the correct answer is that sample rate should be between 3 and 5 times the bandwidth of the scope. Most scopes today employ a Sinx/x filter in lower end scopes and can do a good job of recreating the signal with 3 to 5 times higher sample rate than the bandwidth of the scope.
4. Our scopes have been optimized for this performance allowing our customers to not spend too much for digitizing that will bring little incremental advantage.
2. Isolating Events – In general the real power of a digital scope is to isolate events and store them providing incredible power in troubleshooting. The cornerstone of isolating events is triggering. RIGOL Oscilloscopes have been designed from our inception to provide powerful and easy to use trigger options to make isolating events a breeze.
1. Trigger modes –
1. Edge – The traditional trigger of triggering on a rising or falling edge at a certain voltage.
2. Pulse triggering – Allows the trigger to be set to a pulse either positive or negative and when present for greater than or less than a time that is user defined. This can accomplish tasks like Glitch triggering.
3. Slope Triggering – Triggering when the slope of a signal transition is faster or slower than the user defined setting. Very useful in looking at tri state conditions.
4. Pattern Triggering – When using a RIGOL Mixed Signal Oscilloscope (MSO) you can trigger on a pattern of 1, 0 and don’t cars across up to 16 channels.
5. Alternate – We also provide a alternate trigger when the scope trigger on channel one and acquires channel one, then triggers on channel 2 and displays channel 2, this provides for a true dual time base where each channel can sample at different rates based on there set up.
2. All told we believe the triggering of the DS 1000 oscilloscope family is the most powerful in this range of products by any manufacturer.
3. Display – Display is the final part of a great viewing tool. We believe there are three critical areas of display:
1. The display itself, we have chosen to use TFT color displays in all our products as they provide superior color, brightness and viewing angle to the standard and cheaper LCD display used by most manufacturers today.
2. Update rate – The speed with which an acquisition can occur provides the real time and responsive feel most customers desire in a scope. RIGOL invests in optimizing the update rate. Our DS 1000C and DS 100CD achieve ~ 1000 waveforms per second and is our newest DS 1000CA we placed an additional FPGA in the scope to increase this to ~2000 waveforms per seconds that we believe is the fastest update rate in this class of oscilloscopes.

The bottom line is that we are RIGOL take viewing signals serious and have invested engineering to provide what we feel is the best viewing scope in its class.

posted by Rigol @ 11:35 AM

Mixed Signal Oscilloscopes (MSO) for Everyone

Over the past decade there has been a rise in the use of Mixed Signal Oscilloscopes so much so, that MSO’s are arguably a large specialized segment of the overall oscilloscope market.

Where did the MSO come from? The initial MSO idea was born out of customers shifting jobs and use of different technologies in design. Simply put there were three core customer drivers in the creation of the MSO:

1. Designers were increasingly working with micro controllers while dealing with both digital signals and analog signals. By the 90’s it was quite rare for any design to be either pure (90%) analog or digital.
2. When troubleshooting, engineers often wanted to see both the digital and analog signals in a time correlated manner.
3. When a digital problem occurred, Logic Analyzers were simply too hard to use for an engineers who needed to look at digital signals in their design.

The elegant solution to this emerging need was the Mixed Signal Oscilloscope, introduced in the mid 1990’s by HP.

The product had 3 core attributes that made it a great solution for the customers working on microcontroller designs.

1. The MSO was defined to incorporate both analog oscilloscope channels and digital timing channels coordinated in time and viewable on the same display.
2. The digital channels where designed to be as easy to use as an Oscilloscope, thus dramatically reducing the pain of learning how to use a Logic Analyzer.
3. As most microcontroller designs had relatively low clock rates (<>st MSO’s were <= 100 MHz analog bandwidth and cost less than $3000 USD making the affordable to engineers in smaller companies with smaller budgets.

Over the past decade all major oscilloscope manufacturers have introduced MSO’s into their portfolios, however, all except RIGOL Technologies seem to have forgotten the original customer’s needs for just enough performance and low price.

Today while RIGOL Technologies has MSO’s ranging in price from $699 to $1,499. The other major oscilloscope manufacturers have created MSO ranging in price from $6,700 to well over $20,000. The pricing acceleration has made it quite difficult for engineers working with microcontrollers under 50 MHZ to afford these great tools.

RIGOL Technologies MSO Overview

At RIGOL Technologies we believe there are a large number of engineers working on Mixed Signal (Analog and digital) systems who simply want a great troubleshooting tool that is very cost effective.

We created the DS 1000D series of Mixed Signal Oscilloscopes to provide a great MSO at very affordable prices.

The DS 1000D series offers 2 models for customers wanting to spend less than $2000 on a MSO.

What makes the RIGOL MSO special?

1. Memory – Most customers use MSO a bit different than oscilloscopes in that engineers will typically acquire a set of waveforms both analog and digital and then look for issues or problems. This requires longer memories than basic troubleshooting scopes so that engineers can look before trigger, after trigger or compare cycles of signals. It is for this reason we only put the MSO capability in produces with long memories 100’s of K of memory and made looking through waveform as easy as possible with our UltraZoom ™ capability..
2. Triggering on the digital input – Our MSO’s allow for triggering on the digital channels. The engineer can select +, - , don’t cares and rising or falling edges across all 16 channels of digital acquisition.
3. Digital Channel Isolation – It is often the case that engineers need to only look at a few digital signals. In these cases RIGOL MSO’s provide for an easy way to turn off unused channels and provide only the information needs on the display as shown where we are only interested in the 2 analog channels and 3 digital channels. In this case we are able to move the signals vertically to place them in easy viewable places and where they are aligned with the analog trace.

We believe the RIGOL MSO is by far the best value MSO in the world provided you are working with medium speed clocks that are <>

Both Yokogawa and LeCroy offer MSO’s but at this time of writing we could not obtain the pricing, but they are both higher than Agilent’s for their lowest performance MSO’s.

posted by Rigol @ 11:34 AM

Choosing the right Mixed Signal Oscilloscope for you

Over a decade ago, the 1^st Mixed Signal Oscilloscope (MSO) was introduced by Hewlett Packard by combining 16 digital acquisition channels with 2 analog Digital Storage Oscilloscope (DSO) channels creating the 1^st 2+16 MSO. Since the inception of the MSO, all major oscilloscope manufacturers have created various versions of the initial idea of analog channels combined with digital channels on the same screen and correlated in time.

Today we find that all major oscilloscope manufacturers offer MSO’s with various performance, price and features that can make choosing a complicated endeavor. In this article I will review the initial concept that MSO’s were based on and how they have evolved over the past decade and into the future.

The fundamental thinking behind MSO’s in the 1990’s was elegant in its simplicity:

There are a very large number of engineers working on designs centered on using 8 and 16 bit microcontrollers. These engineers shared some common traits:

1. Their designs were always “Mixed Signal” in that they needed to work with both analog and digital signals on every board. This is true of most engineers.
2. These engineers did not have significant digital problems in their designs thus did not want to learn or relearn how to use a Logic analyzer when trouble ensued.
3. They often did not have the budgets for test equipment like the high end computer and communications design work going on at the same time.
4. The signals used in these designs were typically slower in terms of clock rates typically less than 30 MHz.

The solution was obvious in hindsight but insightful in the early 90’s. Create a single viewing tool that was as easy to use and the scope that all engineers used and provide a time correlated digital waveforms on the same display.

The 1^st MSO was introduced in 1990’s by HP. It was a 2+16 MSO with the top analog bandwidth of 200 MHz and maximum sample rate of 400 MSa/s and was sold for ~ $3000 USD making it a perfect fit for the customers described above.

Overt he past 10+ years we have seen a dramatic expansion of the performance available from the top manufacturers. Today you can find MSO’s with Analog bandwidths from 25 MHz to 2 GHz

RIGOL Technologies offers 2 MSO’s models with 2 + 16 digital channels with up to 1 GSa/s, 1 Meg of memory, Great display and 50 MHz and 100 MHz models for $1,195 and $1,595 this providing the lowest priced full range MSO’s on the market today.

posted by Rigol @ 11:33 AM

Welcome to the Rigol USA Blog!

Hello and welcome to the new Rigol blog. Here you can find product updates, news and site information. Be sure to check the blog to stay informed about Rigol.


-RigolUSA

posted by Rigol @ 4:51 PM