One of the most common applications requiring long record length is serial data analysis in embedded system design. Embedded systems are literally everywhere. They can contain many different types of devices including microprocessors, microcontrollers, DSPs, RAM, EPROMs, FPGAs, A/Ds, D/As, and I/O. These various devices have traditionally communicated with each other and the outside world using wide parallel buses.
Today, however, more and more embedded systems are replacing these wide parallel buses with serial buses due to less board space required, fewer pins, lower power, embedded clocks, differential signaling for better noise immunity, and most importantly, lower cost. In addition, there’s a large supply of off-the-shelf building block components from reputable manufacturers, enabling rapid design development.
While serial buses have a large number of benefits, they also present significant challenges that their predecessors (parallel buses) did not face. They make debugging bus and system problems more difficult, it’s harder to isolate events of interest, and it’s more difficult to interpret what is displayed on the oscilloscope screen. With the optional DPO4AUTO, DPO4COMP, and DPO4EMBD modules, the DPO4000 Series addresses these problems and represents the ultimate tool for engineers working with low-speed serial buses such as I2C, SPI, CAN, and RS-232/422/485/UART.
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