Column Control DTX

I2C and SPI Triggering and Hardware-based Decode for InfiniiVision Series Oscilloscopes

Data Sheets

Find and debug intermittent serial bus errors and signal integrity problems faster

The Keysight Technologies, Inc. triggering and decode options for the InfiniiVision Series oscilloscopes (5000, 6000, and 7000 series) offer hardware-accelerated decode to help you debug embedded designs with I2C and SPI serial buses hardware-based decoding provides the fastest decode update rates in the industry.

Lower-speed serial bus interfaces such as I2C (inter-integrated circuit) and SPI (serial peripheral interface) are widely used today in mixed-signal embedded designs for chip-to-chip communication between EEPROMs, DACs, ADCs, and other peripheral ICs to microcontrollers, microprocessors, and DSPs. Since these protocols transfer many bits of data serially, it can be very difficult to unravel what’s happening in an embedded system with conventional scope triggering.

The Keysight InfiniiVision Series oscilloscopes offer integrated serial triggering and hardware-accelerated protocol decoding solutions that give you the tools you need to efficiently and effectively debug your embedded system designs that have serial buses.

Other oscilloscope solutions with serial bus triggering and protocol decode typically use software post-processing techniques to decode serial packets/frames. Using these software techniques, waveform- and decode-update rates tend to be slow (sometimes seconds per update), especially when you use deep memory, which is often required to capture multiple packetized serial signals. Faster decode update rates enhance the scope’s probability of capturing infrequent serial communication errors.

Keysight’s InfiniiVision Series mixed signal oscilloscopes (MSOs) are a perfect fit for verifying and debugging embedded designs that include a combination of analog signals, serial traffic, and higher-speed digital control signals found in today’s embedded designs. MSOs provide an integrated way to capture and time-correlate multiple analog, serial and digital signals of various speeds with deep memory. Keysight offers MSOs with optional serial bus capabilities in various bandwidth models ranging from 100 MHz up to 1 GHz.

Using an MSO with the N5423A

I2C/SPI option, you can capture and decode I2C or SPI data packets and correlate them with other signals in mixed-signal designs, such as digital control signals and analog signals, as shown in Figure 1 and Figure 2.

And with Keysight’s 7000B Series oscilloscope, you can also easily search and navigate within the protocol lister display to find and mark particular events of interest with direct time-correlation to the waveform display.

Segmented Memory acquisition captures and stores serial bus data packets

The Segmented Memory acquisition option (Option LMT) for Keysight’s InfiniiVision Series oscilloscopes can optimize your scope’s acquisition memory, allowing you to capture more I2C and SPI packets of data while using less memory. Segmented memory acquisition optimizes the number of serial packets that can be captured consecutively by selectively ignoring (not digitizing) unimportant idle. And with a minimum 250 picoseconds time-tagging resolution, you will know the precise time between each captured word. Figure 3. Segmented memory acquisition captures up to 2000 consecutive packets of data with precise time-tagging. Figure 3 shows an example of capturing consecutive occurrences of a particular I2C word with the scope set up to trigger on a Write operation to address 50 HEX. Using this trigger condition with the segmented memory acquisition mode turned on, the scope easily captures 500 consecutive occurrences of this word for a total acquisition time of over 12 seconds. After acquiring these 500 I2C Write commands, we can then scroll through all words individually to look for any anomalies or errors. 

×

Please have a salesperson contact me.

*Indicates required field

Preferred method of communication? *Required Field
Preferred method of communication? Change email?
Preferred method of communication?

By clicking the button, you are providing Keysight with your personal data. See the Keysight Privacy Statement for information on how we use this data.

Thank you.

A sales representative will contact you soon.

Column Control DTX