Tektronix Expands, Enhances Bench Oscilloscope Family

February 28, 2012. Tektronix Inc. has announced a series of new models, options and enhancements to its MSO/DPO4000B and MSO/DPO3000 mixed-signal oscilloscope series. Six new MSO/DPO4000B oscilloscopes offer 1-GHz performance. The company will offer two-channel models with 20-Mpoint record lengths and two- and four-channel “lite” versions with 5-Mpoint record length. New “lite” or “L” models such as the DPO4102B-L drop the starting price for the series to under $10,000.

“We are actively engaged with our customers and are focused on continually updating and expanding our product offerings to meet their changing needs. Some oscilloscope customers may not need more than two channels or record lengths of more than 5 Mpoints and at the same time face tight budget constraints,” said Roy Siegel, general manager for oscilloscopes at Tektronix. “Our new oscilloscope models don’t compromise in key areas such as triggering, search, and analysis.”

All 1-GHz oscilloscopes in the MSO/DPO4000B series include one TPP1000 1-GHz passive probe per analog channel. This general-purpose probe features low 3.9-pF capacitive loading for visibility into the high-frequency signal details found in USB 2.0 and Ethernet devices.

Bandwidth Upgrades for MSO/DPO3000, More Serial Bus Support

Project requirements can change over time, creating a need for improved oscilloscope performance. With the addition of new bandwidth upgrade products for the MSO/DPO3000 series oscilloscopes, engineers can purchase the bandwidth they need now, and simply upgrade it (up to 500 MHz) when project requirements change—without purchasing a whole new instrument. These oscilloscopes target general purpose debug, power analysis, or serial and parallel bus analysis.

In addition to bandwidth upgrades, the MSO/DPO3000 series oscilloscopes now offer support for the MIL-STD-1553 and FlexRay serial buses popular in the aerospace and automotive industries, respectively. Both the DPO3AERO and DPO3FLEX modules enable triggering on packet-level information and offer digital views of the signals, bus views, packet decoding, search tools, and packet decode tables with time-stamp information.

“Anticipating future requirements is never a simple task. By allowing customers to upgrade their oscilloscopes’ bandwidth right on the bench with software and only a few keystrokes, we’ve made that task much easier,” said Siegel. “Now customers can simply buy enough bandwidth for the task at hand and add performance as needs change.”

The new 2-channel, 1-GHz MSO/DPO4000B oscilloscopes are available with a starting price of $9,990 MSRP. The upgradeable MSO/DPO3000 models start at $3,380 MSRP.

Tektronix, www.tektronix.com.

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