Agilent Technologies Introduces Serial Bus Triggering, Hardware-Based Decoding for 5000 Series Oscilloscopes, Providing Quick Troubleshooting at Affordable Price

Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: A) today introduced serial bus triggering and real-time decode support for its 5000 Series oscilloscopes. These capabilities give embedded system developers greater insight into their designs’ CAN (controller area network), LIN (local interconnect network), I2C (inter-integrated circuit), SPI (serial peripheral interface), RS-232/UART and USB (universal serial bus) serial buses. Having these capabilities in the 5000 Series eliminates the need for a more expensive bench scope and accelerates the troubleshooting process.

CAN, LIN, I2C, SPI, RS-232/UART and USB buses were designed to meet specific needs in applications such as automotive control and chip-to-chip communications. In recent years, these low-speed serial buses have replaced proprietary serial and parallel buses in most embedded designs. Their low cost and breadth of development tools make them popular in a wide variety of embedded applications.

“Unfortunately, designers have been unable to view these buses with their traditional portable oscilloscopes,” said Jay Alexander, vice president and general manager of Agilent’s oscilloscope business. “Until now, they’ve had to use more expensive bench oscilloscope models. With this introduction, engineers can troubleshoot their embedded designs quickly with a very affordable oscilloscope.”

The Agilent 5000 Series oscilloscopes now offer triggering for these buses as a standard feature. Customers who already own a 5000 Series scope can add this feature by downloading firmware version 5.0 or higher from www.agilent.com/find/dso5000. There is no charge for the firmware download.

To make it even easier to find and debug errors, the optional Agilent N5423A I2C/SPI, the N5457A RS-232/UART and the N5424A CAN/LIN protocol decode toolsets give designers hardware-accelerated decoding that updates at rates matched only by other Agilent oscilloscopes. In contrast, competitive oscilloscopes -- when they offer serial decoding -- use software-based decoding. This can slow waveform update rates dramatically, increasing the chance that important information is missed in the “dead time” between acquisitions.