Other than looking at signals in real-time, what can be done with a DSO?
Here are five most common categories of DSO applications:
(1) Data Acquisition: The analog signal data is digitized and sent to a host computer for further processing.
(2) General Purpose Debug and Troubleshooting: A circuit or system is being checked and isn't working as expected. Specific test points are probed. The scope captures and displays signals in real time with live measurements. Many scope users now recall "Golden Waveforms" into reference memories to overlay and compare. Large variances are clear evidence of problems. Faults can be saved and used for future reference and training.
(3) Mixed Signal Embedded Systems: Both analog and digital signals are being digitized and displayed for measurement and analysis. This application can provide as many as 40 time correlated signals to view and decode and trigger on low speed serial signals such as I2C or SPI.
(4) Application Specific: A specific measurement or group of measurements is to be taken to verify a component or system performance compliance test, incoming quality test, component qualification test, device verification test, or system calibration. Examples include Power, Jitter, Timing, Optical and Electrical Communication, EMI, and Disk Drives. Scope manufacturer's web pages and Google will help you find application notes, white papers, and methods to automate.
(5) High Speed Serial Data: There are a number of serial data standards that use oscilloscopes to
verify that data is being transmitted and received compliant to published standards. These often
include jitter measurements and a suites of signal integrity verifications conducted in the scope.
Examples include USB 2.0, USB 3.0, SAS, SATA, PCI-E, PCI-E Gen2, XAUI, 10/100 Base T, GigE,
10GigE, and UWB are examples of some of the current serial data standards.
In this application area, the scope is most often used to verify compliance. If not compliant,
the scope can be used to troubleshoot the nature of the failure. This is often revealed in
serial data jitter measurements that include jitter breakdown where Total Jitter (Tj), Random
Jitter (Rj), and Deterministic Jitter (Dj) are calculated real time in the scope. Errors are quickly detected
with Real-Time Eye diagrams getting 250,000 new continuous data bits per trigger.