keysight to launch Streamline Series USB scopes on May 1st

[Stranger_danger]

P9241A - 200MHz
P9242A - 500MHz
P9243A - 1GHz

2 channels, 5GS/s .... looks like a refresh of MegaZoom technology...

"On May 1, Keysight will launch the new Streamline Series USB instruments for component and subassembly test, R&D lab and light manufacturing.
The new Keysight Streamline Series consists of compact, faceless, USB instruments that offer a small footprint (size, weight, power) and mobility to more efficiently test customers DUT. There are faceless, USB choices available today, but they are not scalable and utilize a different user interface than customers are accustomed to. So while the small footprint is great, the learning curve is too time intensive.

Keysight’s Streamline Series offer a scalable solution, regardless of form factor, a common user interface and measurement performance regardless of bench, modular or faceless form factor. This makes it even easier for customers to move between their design phases by utilizing the same measurements and code."

Image attached...

[TheSteve]

Sounds like it will be a 3000T with a single megazoom IV ASIC, no display, no buttons and only 2 channels.

[JPortici]

Questions:
-can it trigger on something different than edges et simila? (Like i think all usb scopes i heard of, they don't trigger on serial bus for example)
-megazoom without screen? So all the disadvantages, none of the advantages?
-will this grand a licence to infiinum software? and even then it's really hard to beat the picoscope software IMHO. Granted i haven't used infinuum much but it was a lot heavier and slower

I don't mind using usb scopes while i'm at the part of the bench with the computer, i find switching windows faster than moving my head and hands around

wow.. exactly two hits on google, one being this topic.
User made this as its first post.. Advanced information..

is this legit? is that you daniel? daniel in a trench coat?

[HighVoltage]

I wonder, what software it will be supplied with?

BenchVue may be? Or something standalone for this USB scope again, like the previous Agilent / Keysight USB scopes.

USB scopes is nothing new to Keysight. I still have a U2702A but it uses its own drivers outside of I/O libraries and its own application software. Is not BenchVue compatible.

[electrolust]

-megazoom without screen? So all the disadvantages, none of the advantages?

how do you figure? megazoom isn't about display.

[JPortici]

Megazoom is more about achieving the highest wfm/s possible by processing the data inside the asic, then drawing the screen directly from there.
the advantage are that you achieve a vey high wfm/s while mantaining the interface lag-free because it's handled by a completely different processor, the processing and analysis is done inside the asic.
the main disadvantage is that the memory is very small because all the processing is done inside the asic and you can't really get high wfm/s from an usb instrument because usb and the os drivers are the bottlenecks, the blind time is huge.

Of course seeing is believing and until that moment everything is speculation

[tmbinc]

It should be totally feasible to do waveform accumulation on the device and then just stream the density plots. Usually Host CPU (and in this case, the USB interface) doesn't affect wfm/s unless you don't do on-device accumulation. The MegaZoom internal framebuffer should easily stream in a decent rate over USB.

In short, if they didn't screw this up, this should be as good as a regular scope, minus the knobs of course. Now if someone could find a cheap source for the DPO7AFP...

[Fungus]

Looks expensive...

[Brumby]

Megazoom is more about achieving the highest wfm/s possible by processing the data inside the asic, then drawing the screen directly from there.
the advantage are that you achieve a vey high wfm/s while mantaining the interface lag-free because it's handled by a completely different processor, the processing and analysis is done inside the asic.
the main disadvantage is that the memory is very small because all the processing is done inside the asic and you can't really get high wfm/s from an usb instrument because usb and the os drivers are the bottlenecks, the blind time is huge.

Just how fast a refresh rate do you think you get with a TFT LCD?  And - more importantly - what do you think the very high wfm/s rate has to do with the display?

The wfm/s rate has to do with the sampling front end of the scope - getting the information into the digital domain.  Once there, this information can be managed at leisure (comparatively speaking), formatted, scaled, annotated, measured and then sent to the display.  Piping it through a USB connection is going to be comparable to streaming a low res video signal.  If you just follow the screen for a 3000T scope, you only have 800 x 480 pixels to worry about.  That's going to be fairly easy to do.

[Fungus]

If you just follow the screen for a 3000T scope, you only have 800 x 480 pixels to worry about.  That's going to be fairly easy to do.

You only need to send the Y coordinate of the 800 pixels that make up the horizontal trace. USB can easily handle that.

[nctnico]

-megazoom without screen? So all the disadvantages, none of the advantages?

how do you figure? megazoom isn't about display.

Megazoom is all about the display! What modern DSOs do is let the acquisition system draw the traces (many acquisitions stacked on top of eachother) onto a screen overlay. The resulting video stream can easely be handled by USB. If you have a screen refreshrate of 5 times per second it will be enough for an oscilloscope (anything more is just icing on the cake but you can't go beyond the display refreshrate which usually is in the 50 to 60Hz ballpark). Hantek has released a similar USB oscilloscope a couple of years ago. All the processing & drawing traces is done inside the box and only the resulting videostream is send to the host.  IIRC Mikeselectricstuff did a teardown and review.

Anyway, let's see what Keysight comes up with. I hope these devices have a new architecture with deep memory and other improvements over the archaic Megazoom architecture they have been using so far.

[thm_w]

This might be almost the same hardware inside: https://www.keysight.com/en/pdx-2843659-pn-M9241A/pxie-200-mhz-oscilloscope?cc=US&lc=eng&lsrch=true&searchT=P9241A%20

Cost is $5,500. USB version I would expect to be a bit cheaper.
4 Mpts memory.