Rohde & Schwarz has strengthened its oscilloscope portfolio by introducing the industry’s first ASIC-based zone triggering.

The company’s MXO series oscilloscopes can offer the world’s fastest zone trigger update rate of up to 600,000 waveforms per second and less than 1.45 us blind time between trigger events. With the new ASIC-based zone triggering, MXO oscilloscopes can precisely isolate events where traditional triggering does not provide the needed flexibility.

Traditional oscilloscope trigger types – such as edge triggering – are often difficult to set up and/or inadequate to visualize certain trigger events. Zone triggering allows users to specify trigger conditions by drawing one or more zone areas on the instrument’s display. The oscilloscope then inspects each acquisition for these conditions and shows the acquisitions on the display for events that meet the graphical conditions. If an event does not meet the graphical conditions, the waveform is discarded and not shown. Zone triggering can be very effective for triggering on non-monotonic edges, serial bus patterns, math waveforms, events across multiple channels, and events in the frequency domain.

The new zone triggering from Rohde & Schwarz is the world’s first ASIC-based solution that works on analog channel signals, math and spectrum.

Philip Diegmann, Vice President Oscilloscopes at Rohde & Schwarz, said: “With MXO zone triggering, users obtain additional triggering capabilities without having to incur significant trigger blind times that historically have diminished the value of software-based zone triggering solutions.”

Rohde & Schwarz offers the new ASIC-based zone triggering functionality as a standard feature for all MXO 4, MXO 5, and MXO 5C series oscilloscopes, beginning with version 2.2 firmware. The firmware is available as a free download on the web. Existing MXO users can update their instruments for free.