Understanding Oscilloscope Specifications - Part 2

Oscilloscopes can be said like heart of electronics testing especially protocol and high speed signals testing. Now a days oscilloscopes come with integrated test benches which help analyze high speed signals like USB, SATA, etc. These inbuilt test benches analyze signal specifications to the minute level and give a complete test report as a package. As a tester, this adds lot of flexibility and helps built confidence on the design. For a tester using oscilloscope initial challenge lies in understanding  specifications of it and selecting a right one for his application. 

Types of oscilloscopes:

The modern oscilloscopes come in various form factors which can be as big as bench-top to as well as wearable type and  middle level as hand-held type/pocket type. Hand held, pocket and wearable types are a very good addition to the field application engineers. That heavy packing, fright charges for a field engineer are no more a burden. The only disadvantage with these portable scopes is that their bandwidth is very less. So, the extent of debugging that can be done by the field engineer with these scopes is very limited. Even with such limitation, it is worth having one with you. Some people always have an eye on the pricing and cost wise they are nothing to worry as most of them are available in the range of $100 to $300. There are oscilloscopes especially designed for debugging phones during development.

Range of bandwidths:

Based on the domain you work on the oscilloscope varies. If you are working on a very low end digital signals and buses like SPI, I2C, SMBUS and UART, you don't need a very high end oscilloscope. The bandwidth requirement for such applications is very less and a 100 MHz bandwidth scope like TDS2014C works very much in such cases. If you are working on high end RF to high end digital signal signals, high bandwidth scopes are a necessity and be careful in choosing bandwidth of scope based on highest frequency to be measured. If you want to measure a frequency of 2.5 GHz, you must have a scope of bandwidth of at least 7.5 GHz. Today oscilloscopes are available up to 100 GHz. 

Waveform Generation:

One of the feature of oscilloscope is you have a output port which outputs fixed frequency signal. Hence, an oscilloscope can also be used in case you need a reference frequency for testing.