Yokogawa completes package for automotive bus testing

The DLM2000, which includes dedicated trigger functions for CAN, LIN, UART, I2C and SPI serial bus patterns, is complemented by Yokogawa’s established SB5000 vehicle serial bus analyser, which offers the ability to debug and analyse the Flexray high-speed vehicle bus with associated physical-layer testing.

‘The automotive market is a major user of serial buses, which present significant challenges in debugging and analysis’, comments Terry Marrinan, Sales & Marketing Director, Europe and Africa, for Yokogawa Test & Measurement Centre Europe: ‘The launch of the DLM2000 means that Yokogawa is now positioned to address these challenges across the board, with solutions ranging from a portable, competitively priced general-purpose instrument up to a dedicated top-end vehicle bus analyser with the widest range of capabilities on the market.’

The DLM2000 Series is a new family of mixed-signal oscilloscopes (MSOs) that represent a major step forward in terms of price/performance specification and ease of use. With up to 500 MHz bandwidth and 2.5 GS/s sampling speed, the new oscilloscopes have the longest memory (up to 125 M points) and fastest update rate (up to 450,000 waveforms per second) in this class of instrument. In addition, the combination of flexible analogue and digital inputs, plus a large-screen display in a compact ergonomically styled body, makes the instruments exceptionally easy to use.

In addition to the key performance specifications, the DLM2000 Series features a number of advanced measurement and analysis features, including histogram and trending functions, up to 20,000 history memories, digital filtering, zoom windows, and user-defined mathematics.

For popular serial buses including CAN, LIN, UART, I2C, and SPI, the DLM2000 can automatically detect and display packet information directly beneath the time-domain waveform and can search or trigger on specific serial bus conditions. It is even possible to decode custom, user-defined serial buses by simply configuring the most common serial bus parameters.

Launched in December 2007, the Yokogawa SB5000 is an oscilloscope-based serial bus analyser focused on in-vehicle serial bus protocols including FlexRay, CAN and LIN as well as providing UART, I2C and SPI trigger and analysis capabilities. The instrument allows users to perform protocol analysis and physical layer waveform measurements simultaneously, offering the capability to debug and troubleshoot bus problems due to noise, signal quality, timing and data errors. Users can efficiently evaluate the performance and verify the operation of ECUs (engine control units) and onboard semiconductor devices, as well as measuring test parameters and their conformity.

The SB5000 is based on the Yokogawa DL9710L digital oscilloscope platform, featuring 5 GS/s sampling and a 1 GHz real-time bandwidth. The instrument has four analogue channels plus 8- or 32-bit logic inputs, and offers a record length of up to 6.25 Mword per channel.

With the analyser, users can observe long durations of bus data over multiple cycles, and confirm changes in timing and period. It is possible to confirm if a FlexRay chip, for example, is functioning normally by focusing on the interface, and also to tell if specific frames such as the synchronisation frame have definitely been sent.

Comprehensive display and analysis facilities linked with dedicated triggers make it possible to observe the relationships between waveforms and analysis results, and to check for glitches and other phenomena in the bus signal. Analysis results and waveforms can be displayed simultaneously, and a search function allows specific events to be located and highlighted.

In addition to physical layer waveform observation and protocol analysis, the SB5000 carries out Flexray eye-diagram analysis and bus driver electrical parameter measurement. It also provides simultaneous analysis of analogue and logic channels, and simultaneous observation of any two buses (in two zoom windows) and dual real-time analysis. This can include two FlexRay channels, two CAN buses operating at different speeds, or combinations of FlexRay and CAN or CAN and LIN.

Support for debugging includes the facility for changing the test scenario, with variable voltage threshold levels and the ability to change the sample point within a bit. A CAN-DBC database file can be imported, allowing symbolic triggering and analysis as well as physical value trend display. The SB5000 also can import a FIBEX (File Base Extractor) database such as the CAN-DBC format.