MegaZoom Concepts and Oscilloscope Operation

Display Update Rate

Display Update Rate

In analog oscilloscopes, the oscilloscope is blind while the electron beam is reset to the left side of the screen. Thus, the update rate of an analog oscilloscope seems high because the blind or dead time of the analog scope is low.

Infrequent or random events that happen while the oscilloscope is blind are missed, and thus not displayed. Oscilloscope users often assume that their scope is capturing the entire waveform and that the update rate is perfect, when the oscilloscope display is actually missing some events. If we could eliminate this dead time, their assumption would be correct.

MegaZoom technology maintains high update rate by using parallel processing and memory segmentation. The MegaZoom oscilloscope flows samples into one area of acquisition memory, and in another area they are read out and processed into displayed samples. By doing this, the processing part of the update cycle does not miss any events. This results in very fast update rate and a responsive user interface.

4-6

Page 120
Image 120
Agilent Technologies 54621D, 24A, 42A, 54621A, 22A, 41A manual Display Update Rate