MIL-STD 1553 Triggering and Hardware-based Decode (Option 553) for InfiniiVision Series Oscilloscope

Debug the physical layer characteristics of your MIL-STD 1553 bus faster

Introduction

The differential 1-Mbs MIL-STD 1553 serial bus is widely used  today in a broad range of aerospace/defense systems including aircraft avionics equipment, space-based systems, as well as many ground-based military vehicles.

Up until now, capturing and measuring the electrical characteristics of MIL-STD 1553 signals has been a difficult and tedious process using a conventional analog or digital oscilloscope.

Setting up the scope to trigger and synchronize on specific transmitted words often required an external synchronization signal or guessing at a specific trigger hold-off setting. And then to determine the contents of a captured and displayed communication packet/word required a commonly used visual “bit-counting” technique, which is slow and prone to errors. But those days are over.

The Keysight Technologies, Inc. InfiniiVision Series oscilloscopes now offers integrated MIL-STD 1553 serial bus triggering, hardware-based decoding, and eye-diagram mask testing to help you debug and characterize the electrical/physical layer of MILSTD 1553 serial buses.

Features

- Hardware-based decoding of Command/Status and Data Words helps find errors quicker.

- Trigger on specific Command/ Status Words, Data Words, and error conditions.

- Perform hardware-based pass/ fail MIL-STD 1553 mask testing to test the analog quality of your network.

- Capture more consecutive decoded 1553 Words using Segmented Memory acquisition.

- Automatically perform parametric measurements with statistics to compare against published MIL-STD 1553 electrical specifications.

- Make physical layer measurements in the field with the only oscilloscope for MIL-STD 1553 applications with optional battery operation.

Time-correlate MIL-STD 1553 protocol decoding with physical layer waveforms

With Option 553 on your Keysight InfiniiVision series oscilloscope (or N5469A for after-purchase upgrades), you can now view MIL-STD 1553 protocol decoded communication time-correlated with your physical layer signals.

And with Keysight’s unique hardware-based protocol decoding, which provides the fastest decode update rates in the oscilloscope industry, the scope can capture and decode up to 100,000 waveforms per second. Not only does fast waveform and decode update rates enhance usability of the scope, but most importantly it improves the scopes probability of capturing random and infrequent communication errors.

Flexible MIL-STD 1553 Triggering

With Option 553 on your Keysight InfiniiVision series oscilloscopes, you now have a wide range of triggering possibilities to help you zero-in on specific MIL-STD 1553 communication transactions as shown in Figure 2. The following triggering conditions are supported:

- Data Word Start

- Data Word Stop

- Command/Status Word Start

- Command/Status Word Stop

- Remote Terminal Address

- Remote Terminal Address + 11 Bits

- Parity Error

- Sync Error

- Manchester Error

To uniquely trigger on specific Command or Status Words, the “Remote Terminal Address + 11 Bits” triggering mode can be used. The “11 Bits” refers to bit times 9 through 19, which are the 11 bits that follow the 5 bit remote terminal address (RTA) field. For example, triggering on a specific Command Word can usually be accomplished by specifying the RTA in hex format, and then the transmit/receive bit plus the 5 bit sub-address in binary format.

MIL-STD 1553 Eye-diagram Mask Testing

With the addition of Keysight’s mask testing option (Option LMT) to your InfiniiVision series oscilloscope, you can also perform automatic pass / fail eye diagram mask tests on your MIL-STD 1553 serial bus. Eye-diagram testing is used in a broad range of today’s serial bus applications.

An eye-diagram is basically an overlay of digitized bits that shows when bits are valid. This provides a composite picture of the quality of a system’s physical layer characteristics, which includes amplitude variations due to transmission line affects, reflections, system noise, over-shoot, ringing, signal edge placement shift, and jitter.