A couple months back I and the Circuit Cellar team attended ESC (Embedded Systems Conference) Boston. Having a booth was new for Circuit Cellar at ESC, so we were very pleased at the positive feedback from people who stopped by our booth—a mix of devoted long-time readers and new faces just learning about us. My thanks to those who became new subscribers on the spot. There are many good reasons for a technology editor like myself to attend tradeshows in our industry. Meeting with technology vendors—the people—face to face is the big one. I don’t care how convenient, realistic or powerful our various forms of electronic communication become. There will never—never ever—be any substitute for meetings done in person and the kind of conversation you can have face to face.
Another good reason to attend a show like ESC is to see the “stuff”—the embedded boards, chips, instruments and so on. I can write all day about the size, weight and power of a COM Express board. But it’s kinda nice to feel the size and weight by holding one in my hand. One type of gear that’s enormously important to see close up is test instrumentation products—oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, signal generators and so forth. Fortunately for me, ESC Boston had a nice cluster this year of test equipment exhibitors. Among these were Pico Technology, Rohde & Schwarz, Siglent Technologies, Tektronix and Teledyne LeCroy.
Like many of you, as an Electrical Engineering major in college I had a lot of EE labs. And I have to make a confession: Operating test equipment was never my strong suit. I remember my lab partners would seldom let me touch the oscilloscope once they caught on to my poor skills. I vividly remember a pair of them saying “Let’s have Jeff write the lab report. That’s at least something he’s good at.” Fast forward to my early years as a New Products Editor, and I sat through many press tour meetings. In those days, test equipment companies would make great efforts to lug their gear across country just to set it up and show me every last new feature of their new logic analyzer or scope.
At this year’s ESC Boston, it was fun seeing the state of the art test equipment on display. And I was able to glean a few insights. At today’s state of electronics technology, it’s quite feasible to have an all-in-one test system. But according to the vendors I talked to, there’s still a desire have a stand-alone box one can call an oscilloscope, for example. Also, even though touch-screen and push-button digital interfaces are mature technologies, many test customers still like feel of turning knobs when it comes to operating test gear.
Exemplifying what can be done with today’s technology, Pico Technology’s approach to test gear is to create compact, easily portable box-level systems. Instead of having a screen and arrays of controls, Pico Technology’s test systems instead interface with your laptop, so that laptop provides all the display and control needs for the equipment. Its latest example along those lines is its PicoScope 9300 Series of sampling oscilloscopes designed for measuring high-speed signals. The 9300 Series scopes provide 2 channels, 15 GHz bandwidth and 15 Terasample/s (64 fs) sequential sampling.
Rohde & Schwarz in contrast makes more traditional test gear, focusing on the high-performance end of the market. Its latest offering is its enhanced power-of-ten oscilloscope family with 10-bit resolution and large memory depth. According to the company, the power-of-ten oscilloscope families R&S RTB2000, R&S RTM3000 and R&S RTA4000 provide 10 times as much memory as comparable instruments and large 10.1” touchscreen displays.
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Among the new products on display at Teledyne LeCroy’s booth at ESC Boston was what it claims as the industry’s first HDMI 2.1 Fixed Rate Link (FRL) Video Generator. FRL is the transport mode for HDMI 2.1 which enables transmission of uncompressed 8K video formats to reach link rates of up to 48 Gb/s.
All in all, my two days at ESC Boston were well spent. Aside from those test equipment vendors, there were a great mix of embedded hardware and embedded software tool vendors I met with at the show. I also sat in on a few presentations, including a great one called “ARM Trace: Kills Bugs Fast!” by IAR Systems’ Shawn Prestridge
This appears in the June (335) issue of Circuit Cellar magazine
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Jeff served as Editor-in-Chief for both LinuxGizmos.com and its sister publication, Circuit Cellar magazine 6/2017—3/2022. In nearly three decades of covering the embedded electronics and computing industry, Jeff has also held senior editorial positions at EE Times, Computer Design, Electronic Design, Embedded Systems Development, and COTS Journal. His knowledge spans a broad range of electronics and computing topics, including CPUs, MCUs, memory, storage, graphics, power supplies, software development, and real-time OSes.
