Waveform measurements

Measurement of waveform pulses and cycles is key to verification of the performance of electrical and electronic devices.

DeepMeasure delivers automatic measurements of important waveform parameters on up to a million waveform cycles with each triggered acquisition. Results can be easily sorted, analyzed and correlated with the waveform display.

Single-cycle measurements

Oscilloscopes are commonly used to display one, or a few cycles of a waveform, from which it is possible to measure parameters such as cycle time, pulse width, amplitude, rise- and fall-time etc.

On-screen rulers (or cursors) can help to make accurate measurements, and many oscilloscopes offer automated measurements that update with each acquisition.

Multi-cycle measurements

In some applications it is necessary to measure the characteristics of waveforms with more than one cycle.

Oscilloscopes with deep capture memory and fast sampling, such as the PicoScope 3000 and 5000 Series (512 MS, 1 GS/s) and 6000 Series (2 GS, 5 GS/s), can capture waveforms with thousands of cycles at full sampling speed with each triggered acquisition. With this amount of data, it is tedious and error-prone to make successive on-screen measurements manually using rulers, even with the benefit of display zooming and panning. Automated measurements are available on some oscilloscopes, but they are typically limited to just the first full cycle captured in memory or use decimated data.

DeepMeasure

DeepMeasure uses up to 100 million samples to capture the results of every cycle contained in each triggered waveform acquisition.

Results are displayed in a table, with the parameter fields shown in columns and waveform cycles shown in rows.

DeepMeasure parameters

Twelve parameters per cycle are included in the latest version of the tool and up to a million cycles can be displayed.

• Cycle time
• Frequency
• Low and High pulse width
• Duty cycle
• Rise and Fall time
• Over- and Undershoot
• Max and Min Voltage
• Voltage peak to peak
• Start and End time, relative to the trigger, are given for each cycle

Overlays

DeepMeasure displays an overlay on the waveform graph that highlights the boundaries, signal level, hysteresis and index number of any cycle selected in the DeepMeasure™ data table, making it easy to identify the cycle of interest. You can choose any cycle in the table view and zoom in to see the details. By placing the mouse pointer on the chosen cycle in the graph view, the parameters of that cycle are shown in a pop-up window.

Sort and Search

The table of captured results can be sorted by each parameter in ascending or descending order, enabling engineering teams to spot anomalies and rapidly identify the cause of complicated issues. So, for example, click on the Rise Time field heading and you can quickly find the fastest (or slowest) rise time in all of the captured cycles. Double-clicking on a specific measurement highlights and zooms to the corresponding cycle in the oscilloscope view.

Export

Captured measurement results can be exported for use with mathematical and statistical functions in tools such as Mathworks MATLAB and Microsoft Excel.

Analyze

In this example several hundred measurement results have been plotted in Excel to show frequency of occurrence of each measured frequency in a histogram.