Software solution sharpens up automotive design

The automotive industry has been undergoing dramatic changes, driven by digital innovations ranging from intelligent self-driving vehicles to electronics systems replacing or augmenting traditional electro-mechanical systems.

Complicating matters, however, are the need for newer mid- and high-speed serial buses such as CAN FD (5-10 Mb/s) and Automotive Ethernet to co-exist with other automotive bus technologies including LIN, FlexRay, MOST and others.

With this release for the 5 Series MSO, Tektronix gives automotive engineers a solution for analysing and troubleshooting electronic control units (ECUs) and multiple buses across all vehicle subsystems.

“These solutions for the 5 Series MSO will enable automotive engineers working on next generation vehicles to gain a richer view of complex systems, solve problems faster and keep projects on schedule,” said Brian Ice, general manager, Mainstream Oscilloscopes at Tektronix. “Unlike alternatives that are limited to four channels, the 5 Series MSO gives customers the ability to synchronously capture much more information and compare interactions for faster and more efficient troubleshooting and debug.”

The automotive solutions for the 5 Series MSO include a 5-SRAUTO protocol option package offers complete serial triggering and analysis of the major buses used in the automotive industry, including CAN, CAN FD, LIN and FlexRay. CAN FD support includes non-ISO and ISO versions of the standard.

Also offered is a 5-CMAUTOEN Automotive Ethernet solution that provides automated compliance support for the IEEE P802.3bw (100BASE-T1) and BroadR-Reach V3.2 specification requirements.

This automated compliance solution includes test software that runs on the 5 Series MSO while performing Physical Media Attachment (PMA) transmitter Group 1 electrical measurement compliance tests, as defined by the OPEN Alliance Special Interest Group (SIG) standard for automotive Ethernet.