Tektronix Inc., a provider of test, measurement and monitoring instrumentation, announced the release of new firmware for the DPO7000, DPO/DSA70000 and DPO/DSA70000B Series oscilloscopes that provide up to 20x throughput improvements for all measurements and applications utilizing finite impulse response (FIR) filters. The most notable performance gains are realized when processing long record length waveforms with FIR filtering enabled, as required for many high speed serial data analysis applications.

The latest generation of high speed serial data standards pushes the limits of test instrumentation, requiring a robust combination of performance and analysis capabilities.

Tektronix provides the broadest and most complete portfolio of oscilloscopes and accessories to meet virtually every need driving the digital age. Specifically, the DPO/DSA70000B Series oscilloscopes offer the highest signal fidelity, with an industry-best jitter noise floor, the best vertical noise performance, flattest frequency response, greatest effective number of bits (ENOB) and scalable performance up to 20 GHz. This level of performance is necessary for testing high speed third generation serial bus architectures. In an era of constrained resources, it is vital that instruments help designers to perform measurements quickly and efficiently. The new firmware further extends Tektronix’ leading performance capabilities by reducing the time needed to perform crucial measurements.

“As the industry’s oscilloscope leader, we are committed to continually improving our products for the benefit of current and future customers to ensure they can rely on Tektronix for the most reliable and widest range of test and measurement equipment available,” said Brian Reich, Vice President, Performance Oscilloscopes, Tektronix. “The new firmware delivers an enormous performance gain that will increase designers’ productivity even as serial data test requirements continue to increase in complexity.”

The new firmware offers gains in a number of areas – it improves the performance for popular application packages as diverse as Jitter Analysis, HDMI and Ethernet compliance testing, and many more. The level of performance improvement scales with filter settings and the length of the waveforms to be processed. For example, the time to apply the filter in the Serial Data Link Analysis (SDLA) application for a 20M record length went from one minute to three seconds.