PicoScope 7 Software
Available on Windows, Mac and Linux
PicoScope® 3000 Series
Power, portability and performance
The majority of digital oscilloscopes still use an analog trigger architecture based on comparators. This causes time and amplitude errors that cannot always be calibrated out and often limits the trigger sensitivity at high bandwidths.
In 1991 Pico pioneered the use of fully digital triggering using the actual digitized data. This technique reduces trigger errors and allows our oscilloscopes to trigger on the smallest signals, even at the full bandwidth. Trigger levels and hysteresis can be set with high precision and resolution.
The reduced rearm delay provided by digital triggering, together with segmented memory, allows the capture of a new waveform every microsecond until the buffer is full.
The PicoScope 3000 series offers an industry-leading set of advanced triggers including pulse width, windowed and dropout. In addition logic triggering allows you to trigger the scope when any or all of the 16 digital inputs match a user-defined pattern.
Some oscilloscopes struggle when you enable deep memory; the screen update rate slows and controls become unresponsive. The PicoScope 3000 Series avoids this limitation with use of a dedicated hardware acceleration engine inside the oscilloscope. Its massively parallel design effectively creates the waveform image to be displayed on the PC screen and allows the continuous capture and display to the screen of over 440 million samples every second. PicoScope oscilloscopes manage deep memory better than competing oscilloscopes, both PC-based and benchtop.
The PicoScope 3000 series is fitted with third-generation hardware acceleration (HAL3). This speeds up areas of oscilloscope operation such as allowing waveform update rates in excess of 100 000 waveforms per second and the segmented memory/rapid trigger modes. The hardware acceleration engine ensures that any concerns about the USB connection or PC processor performance being a bottleneck are eliminated.
Persistence mode rapidly superimposes multiple waveforms on the same view, with more frequent or newer waveforms drawn in brighter colors than older ones. This emulates the phosphor display of a conventional analog scope and is useful for displaying and interpreting complex analog signals such as video waveforms and analog modulation signals.
More information on color persistence modes >>
Hardware acceleration (HAL3) allows waveform update rates of up to 100,000 per second in Fast persistence mode – allowing you to collect thousands of waveforms per second in order to quickly spot glitches and observe jitter.
Ever spotted a glitch on a waveform, but by the time you’ve stopped the scope it has gone? With PicoScope you no longer need to worry about missing glitches or other transient events. PicoScope can store the last ten thousand oscilloscope or spectrum waveforms in its circular waveform buffer.
The buffer navigator provides an efficient way of navigating and searching through waveforms, effectively letting you turn back time. Tools such as mask limit testing can also be used to scan through each waveform in the buffer looking for mask violations.
One waveform, millions of 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, such as pulse width, rise time and voltage. Up to a million cycles can be displayed with each triggered acquisition. Results can be easily sorted, analyzed and correlated with the waveform display.
Mask limit testing allows you to compare live signals against known good signals, and is designed for production and debugging environments. Simply capture a known good signal, draw a mask around it, and then attach the system under test. PicoScope will check for mask violations and perform pass/fail testing, capture intermittent glitches, and can show a failure count and other statistics in the Measurements window.
PicoScope can be programmed to execute actions when certain events occur.
The events that can trigger an alarm include mask limit fails, trigger events and buffers full.
The actions that PicoScope can execute include saving a file, playing a sound, executing a program or triggering the signal generator / AWG.
Actions, coupled with mask limit testing, help create a powerful and time saving waveform monitoring tool. Capture a known good signal, auto generate a mask around it and then use the alarms to automatically save any waveform (complete with a time/date stamp) that does not meet specification.
Buying a PicoScope is not like making a purchase from other oscilloscope companies, where optional extras considerably increase the price. With our scopes, high-end features such as serial decoding, mask limit testing, advanced math channels, segmented memory, and a signal generator are all included in the price.
To protect your investment, both the PC software and firmware inside the scope can be updated. Pico Technology have a long history of providing new features for free through software downloads. We deliver on our promises of future enhancements year after year, unlike many other companies in the field. Users of our products reward us by becoming lifelong customers and frequently recommending us to their colleagues.