Agilent 54610B, 54615B and
54616B 500 MHz Oscilloscopes
Product Overview
The 54610B, 54615B and 54616B
oscilloscopes continue in the
tradition of Agilent Technologies’
popular 54600 series of digitizing
scopes by delivering the comfortable
feel of an analog oscilloscope with the
power of a digital architecture. In
addition, these oscilloscopes offer an
incredibly high level of digitizing
performance to give you confidence
in your critical measurements at a
fraction of the price that you
might expect.
The Feel of Analog
When you’re troubleshooting, you
want to stay focused on two things:
your circuit and the scope’s display.
You don’t want to waste time
pressing buttons or waiting for the
scope to update. That’s why the
straightforward front panel and
real-time display make analog scopes
such vital pieces of equipment for
troubleshooting.
You’ll feel right at home with these
three digitizing oscilloscopes because
they preserve the easy usability of
analog. Front-panel controls look
and function like the controls on your
old analog scope. You don’t have to
change the way you work, which
means you won’t lose time getting
used to a new style of test equipment.
In addition to front-panel controls,
display quality is also a critical factor
in selecting an oscilloscope. The multiprocessor architecture used in these
scopes has been designed for incredibly fast display updates, producing
the interactive display responsiveness
you require. When you make front
panel setup changes, or if your input
signal changes dynamically, you see
the results instantly.
Another important aspect of analog
oscilloscopes is variable display
intensity as a function of waveform
dynamics. Agilent’s proprietary display system emulates this characteristic. Slowly changing portions of
waveforms appear brighter on the
display, while rapidly changing portions appear dimmer. No other digital scopes produce waveforms that
provide this much visual information
or look this similar to analog.
• 500 MHz bandwidth
• 20 MSa/s, 1 GSa/s and 2 GSa/s
sample rates
• 1 ns peak detect (54615B/16B
only)
• Analog feel and digital power for
precise, accurate troubleshooting
The high speed answer for low-speed budgets!
• The industry’s lowest-cost 500 MHz
digital scope. (54610B)
• Single-shot bandwidths as high as
500 MHZ and sample rates up to 2 GSa/s
• 1 ns peak detect at all sweep speeds.
(54615B/16B)
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The Power of Digital
The power of digital opens up entirely new possibilities, such as pretriggering. Pretriggering lets you look
back in time to see what was going on
before the trigger event occurred.
This can be valuable for example, in
finding the cause of a system crash.
Precise, dependable results are yet
another benefit of the digital architecture. With the timebase ranging
from 5 s/div all the way down to 1
ns/div, you’ll get more insight into
waveform details. Plus, a horizontal
accuracy delivers more dependable
results allowing you to measure critical timing specs more accurately than
is possible with analog scopes.
Why put up with faint traces or flickering displays? These digital displays
are bright and stable, so there’s no
squinting, no need for a viewing
hood, no more headaches. You’ll see
what you need to see, across a wide
range of sweep speeds and input frequencies.
The power of the digital architecture
also allows many automated features
not possible in the analog domain.
These productivity enhancing features
help you get your job done easier and
faster:
• Autoscale frees you from manually
rescaling the scope every time you.
move the probe from test point
to test point. Simply press the
Autoscale key, and the scope will
automatically set voltage, time,
and trigger parameters for you.
• With Autostore, the waveform
displays at full brightness while
all previously-acquired waveforms
remain on the scope’s screen at
half brightness. This allows you to
see a history of waveform activity
while simultaneously viewing the
current waveform. This is a great
tool for analyzing worst-case jitter
and noise, or for permanently
capturing infrequent waveform
anomalies.
• Automatic measurements of voltage, frequency, and time, plus
user-defined cursor measurements
make waveform characterization
fast and easy.
• Save and recall traces and setups
for quick and easy testing and
waveform comparisons.
• With one of the optional modules,
a hardcopy of the screen is as easy
as connecting a printer and pressing the PRINT key.
• All setups and measurements can
be remotely controlled for test
automation and analysis using one
of the optional GPIB or RS-232/
parallel modules.
• Even when operating at slow
sweep speeds, the 54615B and
54616B’s 1 ns peak detect mode
will ensure capture of fast transient events that you might otherwise miss.
Measurement Confidence
The analog-like feel and automated
digital features will surely make the
art of troubleshooting fast and easy.
But do these scopes have the level of
performance to confidently capture
your high-speed single-shot and
repetitive signals? No other
oscilloscope, analog or digital, has
the combined level of performance of
the Agilent 54610B, 54615B and
54616B at this price. With these
scopes, you can have confidence in
your measurements. You won’t have
to worry about possibly missing
high-speed information, such as
narrow glitches.
Even though the 54610B is the least
expensive 500 MHz oscilloscope on
the market, it has analog performance that is similar to higher cost
oscilloscope. The 54610B is ideal for
production line test applications.
The 54615B and 54616B combine
500 MHz bandwidth, 1 GSa/s and
2 GSa/s sampling, and 1 ns digital
peak detect on both channels simul-
taneously to ensure high-fidelity
capture of single-shot or repetitive
waveforms. In fact, when using the
scopes’ 1 ns digital peak detect, they
effectively maintain a 1 GSa/s sample
rate on all timebase ranges. You now
have the ability to always capture
glitches as narrow as 1 ns regardless
of the scopes’ sweep rate.
Because of finite amounts of highspeed acquisition memory, digitizing
scopes ordinarily reduce real time
sampling rates in order to capture
longer spans of time on the slower
sweep ranges. When this happens,
waveform anamolies such as narrow
glitches can be missed if they occur
between the actual samples. This is a
common worry and concern among
many digitizing scope users. The
54615B samples and stores all information at a maximum rate of 1 GSa/s
on all sweep speeds faster than 1
microsecond per division. The
54616B can sample at 2 GSa/s at
all sweep speeds faster than
500 nanoseconds per division. On
the slower sweep speeds, these
scopes do indeed, reduce realtime
sample rate, thereby increasing the
uncertainty of capturing narrow
events. However, by engaging the
1 ns peak detect mode, the 54615B
and 54616B effectively maintain a
1 GSa/s sample rate even on the
slowest sweep speeds. This means
that single-shot, 1 ns events won’t be
missed, even when set up to view
extremely slow waveform activity.
Optional Enhancement Modules
Adding enhanced capabilities to your
Agilent 54615B and 54616B scope is
now as easy as snapping on a module.
It’s easy to add direct hard copy, PC
connectivity, remote control, and
advanced measurement capabilities,
such as Fast Fourier Transform (FFT)
and waveform template testing.
You’ll solve problems and boost
productivity in ways that just aren’t
possible with ordinary scopes.
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Agilent 54600-Series Scope Modules
54650A GPIB Interface
Module
54652B RS-232/Parallel
Interface Module
54657A Measurement/
Storage Module
with GPIB Interface
54659B Measurement/
Storage Module
with RS-232 and
Parallel Interfaces
The 54657A and 54659B Measurement/Storage modules allow you to
add flexible, high-performance tools
such as FFT to view signals in the frequency domain. Having both time
and frequency perspectives gives you
an entirely new level of power for
locating and understanding circuit
failures. Common problems such as
harmonic distortion, which is difficult or impossible to see in the time
domain, become much easier to see
when you use the FFT to look at the
frequency domain.
This module also adds time-domain
features that make catching intermittent failures easy. Unattended signal
monitoring and failure detection features allow you to simply set up the
scope and walk away. It will monitor
the signal by comparison to a waveform mask template. When the failure mode appears, the scope will capture the signal and follow your
instructions for time stamping, printing, or storing the signal for later
analysis. The measurement/storage
module provides other features to
make your work easier, including
measurements of channel-to-channel
delay and phase, user-definable voltage levels for timing measurements,
and extended math functions and
cursor readout.
PC Connectivity Made Easy
Receive Agilent IntuiLink
software FREE with the purchase of
any module. Use it to retrieve
waveform images, waveform data,
and automatic measurements into
Microsoft Excel and Word with no
programming. Or, for customers
already using the BenchLink Scope,
use the optional, standalone application to transfer screen images or data
from the 54610B, 54615B or 54616B
oscilloscopes to the PC. From there,
the Windows Clipboard makes it a
snap to create polished reports by
moving scope results into your
Windows applications. And for
archiving, just store the images on
disk in either PCX or TIF formats,
with time and date stamps, too.
IntuiLink for the 54600-series scope
lets you transfer the waveform data
(stored as time/ voltage pairs) for
analysis in your favorite analysis/statistical package. You can also use
scope waveforms as input for
arbitrary waveform generation
by teaming up the Agilent 33120A
Arbitrary Waveform Generator
and the Agilent IntuiLink software
for Arb .
Enhanced TV/Video Trigger for
Precision Video Measurements
With the addition of Option 005, your
54610B, 54615B or 54616B
oscilloscope has the ability to trigger
and perform highly detailed
measurements on the video
components of your system. You
will gain the following features:
• IRE Graticule
• Video Autoscale: Scales the
display to the IRE graticule
• Cursor readout in IRE units
• NTSC, PAL, PAL-M, SECAM,
and generic video formats
• Triggering on any specified line
of video
• Trigger modes of:
Selected line number
All lines
Field 1
Field 2
All Fields
• Full bandwidth vertical output
• TV trigger output
FFT measurement with the 54657A or 54659B Measurement Storage module
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