Automotive Software Package for InfiniiVision X-Series Oscilloscopes

 The Automotive Software Package for Keysight’s InfiniiVision oscilloscopes enables protocol triggering and decode for a broad range of the most common automotive serial buses used today for power train and body control and monitoring. This package also enables other advanced analysis capabilities including eye-diagram mask testing and frequency response analysis to help test and debug automotive electronic systems.

Introduction

The primary reason engineers use oscilloscopes to debug and characterize automotive serial buses, such as CAN, CAN FD, LIN, SENT, PSI5, CXPI and FlexRay, is because of an oscilloscope’s inherent ability to characterize the analog quality of these signals. Performing analog characterization using an oscilloscope is often referred to as “physical layer” measurements.

Many of the most popular automotive serial bus protocol decode & triggering capabilities and advanced analysis features are enabled on InfiniiVision X-Series oscilloscope if licensed with the Automotive Software Package. Table 1 lists the specific measurement capabilities that are enabled on each series with the Automotive Package.

Although there are many oscilloscopes on the market today from multiple vendors that offer automotive-focused options, Keysight’s InfiniiVision Series oscilloscopes offer some unique measurement capabilities for debugging and characterizing the physical layer of automotive serial buses including:

• CAN and CAN FD symbolic trigger and decode (based on .dbc file import)
• LIN symbolic trigger and decode (based on .ldf file import)
• CAN eye-diagram mask testing
• CAN FD eye-diagram mask testing
• FlexRay eye-diagram mask testing
• SENT mask pulse-shape physical layer testing
• Dual-bus time-interleaved protocol lister display
• Hardware-based decoding for responsiveness
• Decoding of all frames captured using segmented memory
• Real-time frame/error counter with bus load measurement
• Zone trigger to isolate occurrences of CAN bus arbitration
• Signal charting (CAN, CAN FD, LIN, and SENT)

To learn more about these advanced measurement capabilities, refer to the extensive list of Keysight automotive-focused application notes listed at the end of this document.

Also available on the InfiniiVision 3000T, 4000A, and 6000A X-Series oscilloscopes is signal charting for the CAN, CAN FD, LIN, and SENT automotive serial buses. For any signals that have been defined in an imported .dbc file (CAN data base file), .ldf file (LIN descriptive file), or SENT transfer function based on user-defined bits, these InfiniiVision oscilloscopes can chart signal values using the “Chart Serial Signal” waveform math function. Signal values can be charted either time-correlated to the captured automotive serial bus waveform or charted in a non-time-correlated roll mode for up to 1 hour. This can be very useful for tracking signal values that change very slowly over a long period of time such as temperature or pressure. Figure 2 shows an example of charting the position of a SENT-based electronic throttle blade. We can see that throttle blade changed from fully open (100%) to fully closed (0%) two times over a 2 second time span. The yellow waveform (channel-1) is the real-time capture of approximately 1500 SENT frames. The purple waveform is a plot of the S1 signal (throttle blade position) based on data in each frame. The Top and Base measurements are the throttle positions in percent. The +Width measurement shows that the throttle position was fully open (100%) for approximately 500 milliseconds.