FlexRay Measurements (Option FLX) for Keysight’s InfiniiVision Series Oscilloscopes

The Keysight Technologies, Inc. InfiniiVision Series oscilloscopes offer integrated FlexRay serial bus triggering, hardware-based decoding, eye-diagram mask testing, and the most extensive FlexRay physical layer conformance test package in the oscilloscope industry. These FlexRay measurement tools, which all come standard with Option FLX, can help you more efficiently debug and characterize your FlexRay physical layer network.

Features:

• Hardware-based decoding helps find errors quicker
• Synchronize on multiplexed data with cycle-base and cycle-repetition triggering
• Perform hardware-based pass/fail FlexRay eye-diagram mask testing based on published standards
• Capture more consecutive decoded FlexRay frames using Segmented Memory Acquisition
• Make physical layer measurements in the field with the only oscilloscope for FlexRay applications with optional battery operation
• Precision differential active probing of the FlexRay bus
• The most comprehensive and automated FlexRay physical layer conformance testing

With Option FLX on your Keysight InfiniiVision series oscilloscope (or N5432C for after-purchase upgrades), you can now trigger on and time-correlate FlexRay communication with your physical layer signals. And with Keysight’s unique hardware-based decod­ing, not only are triggering and decoding of the FlexRay bus based on the same technol­ogy to insure consistency between triggering and decoding, but hardware-based decoding provides the fastest decode update rates in the industry.

Software-based decoding, which is used on all other vendor’s oscilloscopes, tends to be slow. This is especially true when using deep mem­ory, which is often required for today’s FlexRay applications. The real benefit of Keysight’s hardware-based FlexRay decoding is through­put. Not only does this enhance the usability of a scope, but most importantly it improves the scopes probability of capturing random and infrequent communication errors.

Data contents within FlexRay frames are often multiplexed. For example, one particular frame may be used to transmit various engine diagnostic parameters. Temperature may be transmitted during a defined set of cycles within a particular frame, while oil pressure, as well as other engine parameters, may be transmitted during a different set of cycles within the same frame ID. Triggering the oscilloscope’s acquisition to capture and lock-in on particular multiplexed parameters such as this requires cycle-multiplexed triggering. This is sometimes referred to as “base-rep” cycle triggering, which Keysight’s InfiniiVision Series scopes support.

With Keysight’s mask testing capability, you can also perform automatic pass/fail eye-diagram mask tests based on published FlexRay physical layer standards

Keysight’s InfiniiVision Series oscilloscope mask testing is the only hardware-based mask testing in the oscilloscopes industry. This produces the industry’s fastest mask testing with test rates up to 100,000 waveforms tested per second. With test rates this fast the scope can quickly uncover very infrequent anomalies and provide detailed pass/fail statistics, including a Sigma quality report. In addition, you have the ability to customize your testing based on a variety of test criteria

Various mask test files based on different test planes, baud rates, and bus driver characteristics can be obtained from Keysight

With the segmented memory acquisition mode, Keysight’s InfiniiVision Series oscilloscopes can optimize your scope’s acquisition memory allowing you to capture more FlexRay frames along with protocol decoding of each frame while using less oscilloscope acquisition memory. Segmented memory acquisition optimizes the number of FlexRay frames that can be captured consecutively by selectively ignoring (not digitizing) unimportant network idle time between frames. And with a minimum 250 picoseconds time-tagging resolution, you will know the precise time between each frame.

To perform FlexRay Physical Layer Conformance testing, Keysight provides a PC-based software package that you can download from Keysight’s website at no additional charge. With this software pack­age, you can perform automated tests at either receiver input or transmitter output test points.