Can I really use my iPad, or iPhone as an oscilloscope? Yes, you can...

This Award winning iMSO-104 from Oscium is the first mixed signal oscilloscope designed specifically for the iPhone, iPod touch, & iPad. It's intuitive and easy to use, which is why it's the preferred scope for the next generation of inventors. But don’t take our word for it. Download iMSO in the App Store and test drive the interface for free.

Byte Paradigm collected data over a period from 2009 to 2011 from a population of more than 350 engineers involved in embedded system design. What did the engineers say?

A digital pattern generator would save my time when testing embedded systems

"Actually, we have found a small bias with the above results, as a significant part of our respondents are already Byte Paradigm's customers. We think that having a preliminar experience with digital pattern generators or other of our products may explain the high number of respondents in favor of DPGs for speeding up the testing and debugging process." - Says Frederic Leens at ByteParadigm.

This said, there is a remarkable split between the ones clearly agreeing with the above statement, and the ones 'somewhat agreeing' with it. We investigated the answers of these last ones -here is what they say:

Byte Paradigm collected data over a period from 2009 to 2011 from a population of more than 350 engineers involved in embedded system design. What did the engineers say?

Using a hardware prototype speeds up embedded system debug

This result is important because the respondents also use a wide variety of tools and methodologies to overcome the embedded system testing and debugging challenge. In other words, prototyping and going to real hardware is still a way to speed up testing and debugging, no matter if lots of advanced - and sometimes useful - other EDA and software solutions have appeared on the market today.

In the list of 'other' tools and methodologies, we can find:

Byte Paradigm collected data over a period from 2009 to 2011 from a population of more than 350 engineers involved in embedded system design. What did the engineers say?

The 'challenge' in generating the - specifically digital - inputs of an embedded system comes together with the challenge in analyzing its outputs.

Schematically, setting up a 'test / debug' session for an embedded system starts with the questions:

• How am I going to stimulate the system's inputs?
  
• How am I going to observe the system's outputs ?
• How am I going to check if what I observe is correct?
• How am I going to correct detected bugs?

Byte Paradigm conducted a survey in 2009 with over 300 respondents involved in embedded hardware and software design. This survey shows that:

• A majority of engineers (61%) agree with the statement that 'Using a hardware prototype speeds up embedded system debug'. Only less than 10% of the total respondents (335 total) somewhat disagree or disagree with this statement (see table 2).
• Over 83% of the total number of respondents declare that stimulus generation is at least 'as challenging as system response observation'. Figures are sensibly the same whether it concerns IP, FPGA, ASIC, SoC, or full embedded system testing (see figure 2, which presents an average view).

A vast majority of development engineers like going to a 'real hardware' prototype to test and debug what they are designing. Basically, 'testing on prototype' always reduces to 'stimulating and observing'.

In the world of signal generators used for testing and debugging embedded systems, we can find 3 categories of instruments, according to the characteristics of the generated signals and the purpose of generating them. 'Embedded system' should be understood in its broad sense, that is an electronic system with 'out of the PC' computing resources such as microprocessor or microcontroller, ASIC, FPGA, SoC (System-on-Chip), DSP, including analog, digital or mixed-analog/digital systems. Refer to the table below for an overview.
In this blog post, we'll specifically evoke the 'Digital Pattern Generator' as an essential piece equipment for all engineers involved in embedded system design.

Serial protocols are everywhere in ASIC, SoC, FPGA and embedded systems. Digital Serial interfaces are often preferred to larger bus-type interfaces for chip-to-chip communication because:

• I/O pins cost money - so it is an advantage to reduce pin count for communications between components.
• Board layout can be hard for large buses, especially as bus frequency increases.
• Higher frequencies are common with today’s chip technologies. Higher frequencies compensate reduced pin counts, maintaining total data throughput.

So, there is no surprise that serial protocols similar to SPI (Serial Peripheral Interface) are largely used in numerous off-the-shelf and custom digital components (DAC, ADC, flash memories, ASIC, SoC, FPGA).

With Oscium's WiPry-Combo peak power meter and spectrum analyzer, you can pry into the power, spectral, and time characteristics of your signals using an iPhone, iPad, or iPod. WiPry-Combo is the emerging standard in portable RF test equipment for cellular communication planners, RF engineers, wireless network technicians and avid electronics hobbyists.

WiPry-Spectrum is the first 2.4GHz ISM band spectrum analyzer designed specifically for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. It is simple and intuitive to use. It allows you to "Pry" into your WiFi environment to detect and avoid noisy channels. Download WiPry in the App Store and test drive the interface for free.

The World's first hand-held spectrum analyzer is now available at The LAB eShop!

As most of us already knows, spectrum analyzers measures the magnitude of an input signal versus frequency within the full frequency range of the instrument. Primary use is of course to measure the power of a spectrum of known and unknown signals.

These spectrum analyzers used to be big "oscilloscope like", heavy instruments. For you who dragged these instruments around on the field know what I mean. That time is over guys!