Quickly Characterize Automotive Serial Buses

Introduction

Today’s power train and body control and monitoring designs use multiple serial buses and gateways to interchange data between buses. Characterizing automotive serial buses is essential,  as the harsh environments that automotive electronics operate in can induce unwanted transients and critical serial bus control errors. An oscilloscope has an inherent ability to characterize the analog quality of serial buses. Performing analog characterization using an oscilloscope is known as taking physical layer measurements.

Use Case Summary

Oscilloscopes with fast waveform update rates and hardware-based decoding enhance the oscilloscope’s probability of capturing and displaying infrequent serial bus communication errors such as error frames and form, acknowledge, and stuff errors. Equipping the oscilloscope with automotive software further enables engineers to test and debug their automotive serial buses faster.

Standard automotive software includes tools to trigger and decode many of the most common automotive serial buses such as controller area network (CAN), controller area network flexible data-rate (CAN FD), local interconnect network (LIN), single edge nibble transmission (SENT), FlexRay, and more. Using a differential active probe is necessary when probing on differential serial buses such as CAN, CAN FD, and FlexRay.

Oscilloscope software that provides a time-interleaved lister display makes it easy to trace data that passes from one bus to another. Additional advanced software capabilities such as symbolic decoding, zone triggering, signal charting, and mask testing further simplify debugging automotive serial bus communication.

Solution Overview

Keysight automotive serial bus characterization solution enables engineers to quickly and easily perform serial protocol analysis on the most common automotive serial buses. The mixed-signal oscilloscope provides a time-interleaved protocol lister display that time-correlates multiple analog and digital serial buses. Trigger, decode, and perform advanced analysis on automotive protocols with an automotive software package with advanced analysis. Furthermore, eye-diagram mask tests are available for CAN, CAN FD, and FlexRay serial buses.

Learn more at: Oscilloscope Measurement Tools to Help Debug Automotive Serial Buses Quickly

Summary

• Power train and body control and monitoring designs use multiple serial buses and gateways to interchange data between buses.

• Automotive electronics operate in harsh environments that can induce unwanted transients and critical serial bus control errors.

• Oscilloscopes with fast waveform update rates and hardware-based decoding enhance the oscilloscope’s probability of capturing and displaying infrequent serial bus communication errors.

• Automotive software with advanced analysis capabilities enables engineers to test and debug their automotive serial buses faster.

For more information: Characterize Automotive Serial Buses