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| About The Customer |
The customer develops, manufactures and markets electronic
signal acquisition and analysis products and services. The customer
is a leading supplier of digital oscilloscopes that help engineers
validate the design of electronic products for data storage, computer,
semiconductor, and aerospace and defense industries.
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| The Challenge |
The customer manufactures high-performance digital
oscilloscopes. Some of their competitors had incorporated the logic
analyzer capability partially in their scopes. Such scopes are called
Mixed Signal Oscilloscope (MSO), as they are capable of analyzing
analog as well as digital data. An MSO extends the utility of a traditional
oscilloscope by increasing the number of signals that can be monitored.
However, an MSO does not have state analysis, disassembly, or advanced
triggering capabilities, associated with a logic analyzer. The challenge
was to provide such an MSO facility on the existing oscilloscope platform
available with the customer.
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The Solution
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For the hardware, it was decided to use a third party
logic analyzer product, instead of adding the functionality in the
oscilloscope hardware. This approach reduced the cost as well as the
complexity and the associated risk and significantly improved time
to market. The challenge was to integrate this logic analyzer seamlessly
with the scope, so that the external logic analyzer can be controlled
from the scope and digital data from the logic analyzer are displayed
time synchronized with the analog waveforms from the oscilloscope.
The scope and the analyzer interacted with each other via the USB
connector. Each acquired signal separately from the Device Under
Test. To synchronize these two signals over time and to overcome
the inevitable delay involved in transmitting the LA signal to the
scope, one additional connection between the DUT and the "clock
(trigger sync)" line of the LA were set up. Actual synchronization
was done in software by looking at the value in this line and adjusting
for the appropriate delay.
Regarding software, the client had a proprietary, patented development
framework consisting of processors, managers and executives. These
were all ATL COM components, where processors had input and output
buffer and were responsible for data processing. Managers and executives,
who had user interfaces, controlled and contained these processors
and performed the task desired by the user. The whole system was
set up by connecting different components with each other and was
an example of component-based architecture at its best. For the
project, the development team had to comprehend this framework first.
In the MSO application, about ten new processors were developed
along with a couple of managers and executives. The client also
developed several sophisticated testing, profiling and version management
tools in house, which were understood by the project team and extensively
used in the project.
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| The Benefits |
MSO capability, though quite common, was not available
with the scope of our customer. This application bridged that gap
and put an end to the competitive advantage enjoyed by other vendors
in the scope market.
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