For electrical engineers, the oscilloscope is a must-have. It’s widely considered the center of the test bench, as it gives them the ability to view a vast array of analog and digital signals for the purposes of testing, troubleshooting, and debugging.
But there’s always room for improvement. Test equipment companies including Keysight, Rohde & Schwarz, and Tektronix are rolling out new oscilloscopes in 2022 to help keep engineers a step ahead of where the electronics industry is headed.
The oscilloscope is becoming an even more indispensable part of the average engineer’s toolbox due to its ability to record, analyze, and display electrical signals and show how those signals change over time. Many of the latest models for both the entry-level and high-end of the market offer higher resolutions, greater bandwidths, and faster sampling rates. Furthermore, they’re being equipped with deeper stores of sample memory.
Digital oscilloscopes acquire and store electrical signals in the form of waveforms, which depict a signal’s voltage, frequency, and the portion of the signal that’s noise. They also show whether the signal is distorted and the timing between signals.
To make sense of everything, many companies are upgrading oscilloscopes with high-resolution, easy-to-use touchscreens touted as being more intuitive, offering features like multiple display modes to visualize test results and boost productivity.
Many modern oscilloscopes also come with test capabilities that are generally not part of the instrument’s bag of tricks. They promise to take over more of the average engineer’s test bench by integrating everything from waveform generators to serial protocol analyzers.
Despite being the best general-purpose tools for electronic design, not every oscilloscope is the right fit for every engineer. But with many of the latest models to come on to the market, you’re sure to get more bang for your buck.
This gallery presents some of the recent highlights from the world of high-speed digital and mixed-signal oscilloscopes.
