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Ask HN: Oscilloscope for Modern PCB Busses?

2 points by voakbasda ↗ HN
I am working on a team to bring up and debug a new carrier board design for an Nvidia Jetson NX module. Presently, we are having occasional trouble with some of the differential busses (e.g. USB, PCIe, ethernet), so we want to probe and analyze the signals.

Our current electronics bench equipment is not up for the task of working with modern high speed busses, so I am researching our options for upgrading our scope (to start). Given the frequencies involved, the options seem limited to the high end models.

What specifications would you require for this kind of work? What brands/models should we consider? When we are ready to buy, where can we find good deals?

2 comments

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__d
Your designers don't have former colleagues they can ask?

Anyway, I've recently been enjoying the Oxide and Friends podcast series, and they talk a lot about the (high level) issues they experience with hardware design, testing, manufacture, etc. Maybe a "what's on the bench?" episode is worth suggesting?

bcantrill
We would be happy to do an Oxide and Friends on this! To answer this particular question: they are not at all cheap -- and our scopes are the most expensive piece of capital we have. (When we were renting scopes, we were spending a similar amount on scopes that we were spending on commercial space!) We are a Teledyne LeCroy shop -- but we also have some experience with Keysight and Tektronix as well.