One of the first things EE students learn in their ac circuits course is resonance. Electrical resonance, to quickly review, arises in an electric circuit at a frequency called the resonances frequency when the impedances or admittances of circuit elements cancel each other. In some circuits, resonance happens when the impedance between the input and […]
oscilloscope measurements
Tricks for pulling signals out of noise
Thermal noise, also known as Johnson-Nyquist noise, is generated by thermal agitation of charge carriers inside an electrical conductor or component regardless of any applied voltage. A small voltage can actually be measured across a wire segment that is at non-zero temperature and lying on a non-conductive surface. Apprentice electricians are puzzled by this phenomenon, […]
PHY interposer supports PCI Express 5.0 CEM spec
The CrossSync PHY technology now supports the PCI Express 5.0 Card Electromechanical (CEM) specification. This new CEM interposer (PE230UIA-X) joins the existing CrossSync PHY enabled M.2 form factor interposers (PE210UIA for PCIe 4.0 and the PE222UIA for PCIe 5.0), with more form factors in development to fill out the portfolio of cross-layer probing. Engineers at […]
Making pictures from sound on an oscilloscope
If you take an ordinary sound file and feed it to both channels of an oscilloscope operating in X-Y mode, you’ll get an image on the scope looking a lot like a pulsating straight line at some angle to the horizontal. But the situation changes if you use a stereo signal with the left channel […]
Odd ball application department: Using a scope to display SEM images
The Applied Science YouTube channel run by Ben Krasnow (who in his day job is a hardware engineer at Verily, Google Life Sciences) focuses on interesting applications of science and technology. One video in particular caught our eye where Kranow uses an oscilloscope to help view digital images captured by a scanning electron microscope made […]
Examining serial protocols with test instruments
There are currently a large number of serial protocols in use. Many oscilloscopes include the capability to decode and display data sent over widely used serial buses. Recently, a blog on the Tektronix website detailed which serial decode packages engineers most commonly configure on the Tektronix scopes they order. The buses that turn out to […]
Noise quantification and measurement
In choosing a way to mitigate electronic noise mitigation, it is necessary first to quantify it and ascertain its source. Thermal, also known as Nyquist or Johnson-Nyquist noise, is basis for many types of noise. It arises in all material objects to the extent that they are conductive. You can observe the effects of this […]
DisplayPort 2.0 PHY test setup integrates BERT, analysis of multi-lane 20 Gb/sec video links
The QualiPHY DisplayPort 2.0 source and sink compliance and DisplayPort AUX DME (Decode, Measure & Eye Diagram) oscilloscope software options build on a recently announced industry-leading DisplayPort 2.0 Link Layer compliance test solution. The market demands higher resolution for Virtual Reality and PC displays — up to 16,000 pixels (16K) — and ever faster refresh […]
Measuring picoseconds without breaking the bank
Modern analog/digital converters can help implement equivalent time sampling to provide picosecond timing resolution. Dave Guidry, Texas Instruments Inc. A picosecond is an astonishingly short period of time. Imagine a stopwatch with a trillion divisions between each tick of the second hand. While it sounds fantastical, this resolution of time measurement is indeed necessary for […]
A scope-based technique for optimizing EMI input filters
A simple oscilloscope setup can size common-mode and differential-mode noise filtering components separately and more accurately. Marcus Sonst, Rohde & Schwarz Any switched-mode power supply (SMPS) needs an EMI (electromagnetic interference) input filter to avoid disturbing power lines. Input filters generally contain both common-mode and differential-mode filter elements, and the two are rarely optimized separately. […]
