On your mark…get set…trigger!
Putting oscilloscope users’ skills to test at Elektronikmässan
Elektronikmässan in Stockholm stands as the premier electronics event in the Nordics, bringing together top innovators, engineers, and manufacturers to explore cutting-edge advancements in technology.
This year, we put engineers' oscilloscope expertise to the test with an ‘Oscilloscope Trigger Challenge’. The concept was straightforward yet technical: participants were given a complex signal consisting of a steady waveform overlaid with an intermittent pulse running in the background. Their task? Use their oscilloscope skills to isolate and trigger on the intermittent pulse as quickly as possible.
The challenge highlighted a common pitfall: relying on an ‘Autoscale’ approach often led to triggering on the stable signal, missing the elusive intermittent pulse. Success required a manual approach, demanding participants demonstrate their proficiency in fine-tuning trigger settings, waveform analysis, and understanding signal behavior.
How well do you trigger?
Participants’ experience
The challenge drew participants from a wide range of industries, including educators, engineers, and professionals from diverse technical fields. Most began by correctly zooming into the signal, carefully selecting their trigger type and setting trigger limits. While their approaches were technically correct, even the most experienced participants took between one to three minutes to isolate the intermittent signal.
Figure 2. Oscilloscope users who worked as engineers, teachers, developers attempted to trigger the complex signal.
This presented the perfect opportunity to showcase the power of Keysight’s Zone Triggering function. With its intuitive touch-screen interface, users simply needed to draw a box directly on the display with their finger to define the area of interest. The oscilloscope then automatically triggered on any signal within that zone.
The result? What previously took minutes was achieved in just ten seconds using Zone Triggering—demonstrating how thoughtful, intuitive design can significantly improve workflow efficiency.
Figure 3. Drawing boxes directly on the screen enabled much faster triggering – from three minutes to ten seconds!
Reduce triggering time from three minutes to up to as little as ten seconds
The amount of time taken to trigger a signal would of course also depend on how frequently the intermittent signal occurs. In our example, it was a fraction of the time that would otherwise have been taken using traditional triggering methods. But one thing is sure: zone triggering makes triggering of complex, intermittent signals much easier, allowing you to focus on the job at hand instead.
But are all zone triggering capabilities made equal?
One question that occasionally arises is, how dependable is this zone triggering function? Isn’t it just a combination of a touch screen and software manipulation?
While some scopes in the market do rely on software manipulation to enable this feature, this poses a danger as this is limited by hardware limitations, or simply by processing time of the instrument software, especially for fast, intermittent signals. What’s more, software processing speed often slows down when it is busy multi-tasking – something that often happens on oscilloscopes.
Keysight’s zone trigger relies instead on our custom ASIC (MegaZoom 5 on our newest oscilloscopes), i.e. this feature is hardware-based. Hardware-based capabilities enable optimum performance that is uncompromising, ensuring that fast intermittent signals are captured by the scope, regardless if zone trigger or traditional triggering methods are used.
Ensuring hardware design is used to support most critical functionalities eventually frees up the software to perform other tasks, such as Fault Hunter Software (on the HD3 and more advanced models) that automatically evaluates an unknown signal against user-definable criteria to sniff out errors that occur as infrequently as up to two days.
Hardware-based functionality
Besides zone trigger, many other functions are hardware-enabled in Keysight’s latest real-time oscilloscopes. Among the most recognizable are:
- serial decoding
- mask testing
Our more recent oscilloscopes (the 1GHz, 14-bit HD3 series oscilloscope) come with a brand-new 14-bit custom ADC, an all-new custom ASIC and an entirely new front-end architecture. All these ensure that these oscilloscopes work faster and efficiently, optimizing performance that is not slowed down by software processing.
Download this application note ‘Why is Oscilloscope Vertical Accuracy Important’ that explains why you would want to select an oscilloscope with higher vertical accuracy.
The Reward
Perhaps you might think, what made visitors want to take the Trigger Challenge in the first place, risking embarrassing themselves should he/she find themselves at the bottom of the medal tally? While it was mainly a lot of fun among oscilloscope users, we also offered the winners a limited-edition assembly brick that was one of the cutest giveaways we have ever had for a new product introduction.
But even more important, we were able to demonstrate, and allow visitors to participate, in showing how designed-in, hardware-enabled capabilities can simplify, save time and most importantly - get the job done right.
If you missed the event this year or want to see where you could participate in upcoming events (who knows, we might be running a similar Trigger Challenge in an event near you), check out our latest happenings.
About the Keysight InfiniiVision HD3 Series
The HD3 Series brings Keysight’s industry-leading capabilities from high-performance oscilloscopes to regular benchtop oscilloscope users, making precision portable from 200 MHz to 1 GHz. Leveraging custom hardware technology from more advanced models, the HD3 boasts impressive resolution with four times vertical accuracy, enabled by a custom 14-bit ADC and new front-end design that halves the noise floor of its closest equivalent. Paired with our fast, uncompromised waveform update rate and twenty-five times more memory, the HD3 Series can capture signals that you often can’t even see on other oscilloscopes.