User interface raises the bar for scopes

The Rohde & Schwarz RTO family of oscilloscopes are capable of analyzing one million waveforms per second and also feature a digital trigger system  which minimizes trigger jitter.

The family will initially be available in two- and four-channel models with bandwidths of 1 GHz and 2 GHz and a maximum sampling rate of 10 Gsample per second.
According to Rohde & Schwarz conventional oscilloscopes capture signals at only 0.5 percent of the acquisition cycle. They spend most of their time storing, processing and displaying data while any errors occurring in the meantime go undetected.

To address this issue, the company has increased the acquisition time by a factor of 20, raising it to 10 percent. An in-house designed ASIC being manufactured by IBM achieves realtime processing of the digital measurement enabling the scopes to analyze one million waveforms per second. All of the setting options and analysis functions remain available without reducing the measurement speed.

Rohde & Schwarz believes conventional analog trigger systems struggle with the time and amplitude offset between the analog trigger path and the digital signal acquisition path. This limits the instrument’s accuracy.


With the purely digital trigger architecture implemented for the first time in the R&S scopes, the trigger and the captured data share a common signal path and a common time base. This reduces trigger jitter and provides exact assignment of the trigger to the signal.

The digital trigger rearms immediately after a trigger event. The rearming delay that is typical of analog triggers is eliminated so that signal faults do not go undetected.

The single-core A/D converter in the R&S RTO scopes also helps to ensure high accuracy. Designed by Rohde & Schwarz engineers and manufactured at Innovations for High Performance Microelectronics (IHP) in Franfurt Oder the single core Silicon Germanium device operates at a rate of 10 Gsample per second.

The traditional approach to achieving such high conversion speeds is to use several slower A/D converters operating in parallel with time offset. Because behavior is not always absolutely consistent from one A/D converter to the next, mismatch can occur. The Rohde & Schwarz 8-bit converter with more than seven effective bits achieves very high dynamic range. The result is minimal signal distortion and low inherent noise.

One of the most impressive aspects of the RTO range is the implementation of the user interface via a touch-screen operation. It has semitransparent dialog boxes, movable measurement windows, configurable toolbar, and preview icons with live waveforms


Rounding out its oscilloscope portfolio, Rohde & Schwarz also offers a range of active and passive probes. The active probes have a micro button, which can be assigned a number of different functions to control the scope directly; and the R&S ProbeMeter, a built-in voltmeter that enables precise DC measurements for quick checks on supply voltages or operating points, regardless of the scope’s current channel settings.

The RTO is one of two families of scopes launched as Rhode & Schwarz made its market entry.