Today's integrated designs need an oscilloscope that is just as integrated - such as the MDO3000 Mixed Domain Oscilloscope (MDO) Series. It is the ultimate 6-in-1 integrated oscilloscope that includes an integrated spectrum analyzer, arbitrary function generator, logic analyzer, protocol analyzer, and digital voltmeter/counter. The MDO3000 is completely customizable and fully upgradeable. Add the instruments and performance you need now - or later.
| Need more input frequency range on the spectrum analyzer? Need to analyze analog, digital, and RF simultaneously? Need more record length or a larger display? Consider the MDO4000B Series oscilloscopes www.tektronix.com/MDO4000  ► 3 GHz and 6 GHz integrated spectrum analyzers ► Simultaneous acquisition of analog, digital and RF ► 20 M record length ► 10.4 inch XGA display |
At the core of the MDO3000 Series is a world-class oscilloscope, offering comprehensive tools that speed each stage of debug – from quickly discovering anomalies and capturing them, to searching your waveform record for events of interest and analyzing their characteristics and your device’s behavior.
To debug a design problem, first you must know it exists. Every design engineer spends time looking for problems in their design, a time- consuming and frustrating task without the right debug tools.
Digital phosphor technology provides you with fast insight into the real operation of your device. Its fast waveform capture rate – greater than 280,000 wfm/s with FastAcq – gives you a high probability of quickly seeing the infrequent problems common in digital systems: runt pulses, glitches, timing issues, and more.
To further enhance the visibility of rarely occurring events, intensity grading is used to indicate how often rare transients are occurring relative to normal signal characteristics. There are four waveform palettes available in FastAcq acquisition mode.
These color palettes quickly highlight the events that over time occur more often or, in the case of infrequent anomalies, occur less often.
Infinite or variable persistence choices determine how long waveforms stay on the display, helping you to determine how often an anomaly is occurring.
Digital phosphor technology with FastAcq enables greater than 280,000 wfms/s waveform capture rate and real-time color-intensity grading.
Discovering a device fault is only the first step. Next, you must capture the event of interest to identify root cause. To enable this, the MDO3000 contains over 125 trigger combinations providing a complete set of triggers - including runt, logic, pulse width/glitch, setup and hold violation, serial packet, and parallel data - to help quickly locate your event of interest. And with up to a 10 M record length, you can capture many events of interest, even thousands of serial packets, in a single acquisition for further analysis while maintaining high resolution to zoom in on fine signal details.
Over 125 trigger combinations make capturing your event of interest easy.
With long record lengths, a single acquisition can include thousands of screens of waveform data. Wave Inspector®, the industry’s best tool for waveform navigation and automated search, enables you to find events of interest in seconds.
Wave Inspector controls provide unprecedented efficiency in viewing, navigating, and analyzing waveform data. Zip through your long record by turning the outer pan control (1). Get details from the beginning to end in seconds. See something of interest and want to see more details? Just turn the inner zoom control (2).
A dedicated, two-tier front-panel control provides intuitive control of both zooming and panning. The inner control adjusts the zoom factor (or zoom scale); turning it clockwise activates zoom and goes to progressively higher zoom factors, while turning it counterclockwise results in lower zoom factors and eventually turning zoom off. No longer do you need to navigate through multiple menus to adjust your zoom view. The outer control pans the zoom box across the waveform to quickly get to the portion of waveform you are interested in. The outer control also utilizes force-feedback to determine how fast to pan on the waveform. The farther you turn the outer control, the faster the zoom box moves. Pan direction is changed by simply turning the control the other way.
Press the Set Mark front-panel button to place one or more marks on the waveform. Navigating between marks is as simple as pressing the Previous (←) and Next (→) buttons on the front panel.
The Search button allows you to automatically search through your long acquisition looking for user-defined events. All occurrences of the event are highlighted with search marks and are easily navigated to, using the front- panel Previous (←) and Next (→) buttons. Search types include edge, pulse width/glitch, timeout, runt, logic, setup and hold, rise/fall time, parallel bus, and I2C, SPI, RS-232/422/485/UART, USB 2.0, CAN, LIN, FlexRay, MIL-STD-1553, and Audio packet content. A search mark table provides a tabular view of the events found during the automated search. Each event is shown with a time stamp, making timing measurements between events easy.
Search step 1: You define what you would like to find.
Search step 2: Wave Inspector automatically searches through the record and marks each event with a hollow white triangle. You can then use the Previous and Next buttons to jump from one event to the next.
Search step 3: The Search Mark table provides a tabular view of each of the events found by the automated search. Each event is shown with a time stamp making timing measurements between events easy.
Verifying that your prototype’s performance matches simulations and meets the project’s design goals requires analyzing its behavior. Tasks can range from simple checks of rise times and pulse widths to sophisticated power loss analysis and investigation of noise sources.
The oscilloscope offers a comprehensive set of integrated analysis tools including waveform- and screen-based cursors, automated measurements, advanced waveform math including arbitrary equation editing, FFT analysis, waveform histograms, and trend plots for visually determining how a measurement is changing over time.
Automated measurement readouts provide repeatable, statistical views of waveform characteristics.
Each measurement has help text and graphics associated with it that help explain how the measurement is made.
Waveform histograms show visually how waveforms vary over time. Horizontal waveform histograms are especially useful for gaining insight into how much jitter is on a clock signal, and what the distribution of that jitter is. Vertical histograms are especially useful for gaining insight into how much noise is on a signal, and what the distribution of that noise is. Measurements taken on a waveform histogram provide analytical information about the distribution of a waveform histogram, providing insight into just how broad a distribution is, the amount of standard deviation, the mean value, etc.
Waveform histogram of a rising edge showing the distribution of edge position (jitter) over time. Included are numeric measurements made on the waveform histogram data.
Many video engineers have remained loyal to analog oscilloscopes, believing the intensity gradations on an analog display are the only way to see certain video waveform details. The fast waveform capture rate of the MDO3000, coupled with its intensity-graded view of the signal, provides the same information-rich display as an analog oscilloscope, but with much more detail and all the benefits of digital scopes.
Standard features such as IRE and mV graticules, holdoff by fields, video polarity, HDTV and custom (nonstandard) video triggers, and an Autoset smart enough to detect video signals, make these the easiest to use oscilloscopes on the market for video applications. And with high bandwidth, four analog inputs, and a built-in 75 Ω input termination (not available on 1 GHz models), the oscilloscope provides ample performance for analog and digital video use. There is even a video picture mode enabling you to see the picture of the video signal you are viewing – for NTSC and PAL signals.
Viewing an NTSC video signal. Notice the intensity-graded view provided by the MDO3000's ability to represent time, amplitude, and distribution over time.
Viewing an NTSC full color bar signal image. Video picture mode contains automatic contrast and brightness settings as well as manual controls.
Ever increasing consumer demands for longer battery-life devices and for green solutions that consume less power require power-supply designers to characterize and minimize switching losses to improve efficiency. In addition, the supply’s power levels, output purity, and harmonic feedback into the power line must be characterized to comply with national and regional power quality standards. Historically, making these and many other power measurements on an oscilloscope has been a long, manual, and tedious process. The MDO3000’s optional power analysis tools greatly simplify these tasks, enabling quick, repeatable and accurate analysis of power quality, switching loss, harmonics, safe operating area (SOA), modulation, ripple, and slew rate (di/dt, dv/dt). Completely integrated into the oscilloscope, the power analysis tools provide automated, repeatable power measurements with a touch of a button.
Power Quality measurement table. Automated power measurements enable quick and accurate analysis of common power parameters.
A common task during the development process is characterizing the behavior of certain signals in a system. One method, called limit testing, is to compare a tested signal to a known good or "golden" version of the same signal with user-defined vertical and horizontal tolerances. Another common method, called mask testing, is to compare a tested signal to a mask, looking for where a signal under test violates the mask. The MDO3000 Series offers both limit and mask testing capability useful for long-term signal monitoring, characterizing signals during design, or testing on a production line. Tailor a test to your specific requirements by defining test duration in number of waveforms or time, a violation threshold that must be met before considering a test a failure, counting hits along with statistical information, and actions upon violations, test failure, and test complete. Whether specifying a mask from a known good signal or from a custom mask, conducting pass/fail tests in search of waveform anomalies such as glitches has never been easier.
Limit Test showing a mask created from a golden waveform and compared against a live signal. Results showing statistical information about the test are displayed.
The MDO3000 Series include passive voltage probes with industry best capacitive loading of only 3.9 pF. The included TPP probes minimize the impact on devices under test and accurately deliver signals to the oscilloscope for acquisition and analysis. The following table shows which TPP probes come standard with each MDO3000 model.
| MDO3000 model | Included probe |
|---|---|
| MDO3012, MDO3014, MDO3022, MDO3024 |
TPP0250: 250 MHz, 10x passive voltage probe. One per analog channel |
| MDO3032, MDO3034, MDO3052, MDO3054 |
TPP0500B: 500 MHz, 10x passive voltage probe. One per analog channel |
| MDO3102, MDO3104 | TPP1000: 1 GHz, 10x passive voltage probe. One per analog channel |
The TekVPI probe interface sets the standard for ease of use in probing. In addition to the secure, reliable connection that the interface provides, TekVPI probes feature status indicators and controls, as well as a probe menu button right on the comp box itself. This button brings up a probe menu on the oscilloscope display with all relevant settings and controls for the probe. The TekVPI interface enables direct attachment of current probes without requiring a separate power supply. TekVPI probes can be controlled remotely through USB, GPIB, or LAN, enabling more versatile solutions in ATE environments. The TekVPI inputs provide up to 25 W of power to the front panel connectors from the internal power supply.
TekVPI probe interface simplifies connecting your probes to the oscilloscope.
Exporting data and measurements is as simple as connecting a USB cable from the oscilloscope to your PC. Key software applications – OpenChoice® Desktop, and Microsoft Excel and Word toolbars – are included standard with each oscilloscope to enable fast and easy direct communication with your Windows PC.
The included OpenChoice Desktop enables fast and easy communication between the oscilloscope and your PC through USB or LAN for transferring settings, waveforms, and screen images.
The embedded e*Scope® capability enables fast control of the oscilloscope over a network connection through a standard web browser. Simply enter the IP address or network name of the oscilloscope and a web page will be served to the browser. Transfer and save settings, waveforms, measurements, and screen images or make live control changes to settings on the oscilloscope directly from the web browser.
e*Scope in a web browser showing the display of an MDO3000. Use e*Scope to quickly document your work by saving screen images, waveforms, or setups for later use.
The MDO3000 is the first oscilloscope in its class to include an integrated spectrum analyzer. Each oscilloscope includes a spectrum analyzer with a frequency range of 9 kHz up to the analog bandwidth of the instrument. The spectrum analyzer frequency range of each instrument can be upgraded from 9 kHz to 3 GHz (option MDO3SA), enabling spectral analysis on most consumer wireless standards.
When using the spectrum analyzer input, the MDO3000 Series display becomes a full-screen Frequency Domain view.
Key spectral parameters such as Center Frequency, Span, Reference Level, and Resolution Bandwidth are all adjusted quickly and easily using the dedicated front-panel menus and keypad.
MDO3000 frequency domain display.