A digital oscilloscope is a complex electronic device composed of various software and electronic hardware modules that work together to capture, process, display and store data that represents the signals of interest of an operator.
Digital oscilloscopes are often referred to as digital storage oscilloscope (DSO) or digital sampling oscilloscopes (DSO).
In its simplest form, a digital oscilloscope features six elements — the analog vertical input amplifiers, analog-to-digital converter and a digital waveform memory, a time base which features a triggering and clock drive, the circuits for waveform display and reconstruction, the LED or LCD display, and the power supply.
Digital oscilloscopes periodically samples a time varying analog signal and stores in the waveform memory the signal’s values in correlation with time.
Using an internal clock, digital oscilloscopes chops input signals into separate time points. The instantaneous amplitude values are then quantized by the oscilloscope at those points. The resulting digital representations are then stored in a digital memory.
At a predetermined clock rate, the display is regenerated from the device’s memory and is consequently viewed as connected dots or a series of dots. Digital Oscilloscopes provides powerful features on how they trigger the digitized data from its memory.
Some of the advantages of a digital oscilloscope over analog oscilloscope include the scope’s ability to store digital data for later viewing, upload to a computer, generate a hard copy or store on a diskette and its capacity to instantly make measurements on the digital data.
After a trigger event, digital oscilloscopes can be made to display the waveforms as compared to an analog oscilloscope that needs to be triggered first before it starts a trace.
A digital oscilloscope also has the ability to examine digitized information stored in its memory and make automatic measurements based on the selected parameters of the user, such as voltage excursion, frequency and rise times.
It can also display similar captured data in various ways. This capability is attributed to the presence of more captured data than what shown on the screen. It also offers the flexibility of providing a vast array of storage, processing and display options, such as graphics and one-quarter and one-half screen displays and multiple step processing programs.
A digital oscilloscope is ideal for displaying intricate signal waveforms where calculations and measurements on specific portions of the waveforms must be made to provide numerical and waveform output displays which reflects the chosen parameters of the waveforms.
The two general categories of digital oscilloscopes are single shot oscilloscopes and random interleave or equivalent time sampling oscilloscopes.
Single shot oscilloscope starts real-time sampling of an event after a trigger condition has been satisfied. The speed of the analog-to-digital converter determines the limitations of the sampling speed of single shot oscilloscopes. The size of the device’s acquisition memory, which receives the output from the converter, limits the time on which a single event can be sampled.
Meanwhile, random interleave oscilloscope or equivalent time sampling oscilloscope relies on sampling repetitive events at different points over certain periods of time.
harish mishra says
every aspect covered briefly.
Mefteh says
Great!
Can i connect it with a homemade fluxgate magnetometer to get an earth analyzer or tester with high performance?
Thank you