Priggen Special Electronic, a distributor of Pico Technology Ltd. of the U.K., has announced the latter's PicoScope 6000 Series of oscilloscopes that claims to have the highest sampling rates and deepest memories of any oscilloscope in this price range.
The six oscilloscopes in the series offer 4 channels with a maximum sampling rate of 5 GS/s, a range of input bandwidths from 250 MHz to 500 MHz, and buffer memory depths from 128 M to 1 G samples.
With an option of either a built-in function generator or a built-in arbitrary waveform generator, these compact and economical scopes are for engineers and technicians needing a complete test bench in a single unit.
The PicoScope oscilloscope software includes as standard all the oscilloscope and spectrum analyser functions and serial decoding, mask limit testing, segmented memory and advanced triggers: features that often cost extra on other manufacturers’ scopes.
Running on a Windows PC, PicoScope provides a large, clear display that shows waveforms in great detail and allows easy zooming and panning under keyboard or mouse control. Other built-in features are colour persistence displays with fast waveform update rates, math channels, automatic measurements with statistics, programmable alarms, and decoding of I2C, UART/RS232, SPI, CAN and LIN bus signals.
The advanced triggering modes include pulse width, interval, window, window pulse width, level dropout, window dropout, runt pulse, variable hysteresis, and logic. Digital triggering ensures lower jitter, greater accuracy and higher voltage resolution than the analogue triggering found on many competing scopes. The AUX input can be used as an additional trigger or as an external sampling clock.
A free Software Development Kit (SDK) allows control f the new scopes from own custom applications. The SDK includes example programs in C, C++, Excel and LabVIEW, or can be used with any other language that supports C calling conventions. The SDK and PicoScope software are compatible with Microsoft Windows XP, Vista and Windows.