Tektronix exits logic analyzer market - Who won the Logic Analyzer Wars?

[effectivebits]

I'm still a lurker here, but don't post as much as I left Tektronix last year (Hi Alan!).....

But I saw this post on LinkedIn and thought it was fascinating for those of us who spent the last 20 years following the Logic Analyzer wars.  Wanted to share here with fellow test equipment junkies.

Joel Avrunin

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/who-won-logic-analyzer-wars-barbara-aichinger/

Who won the Logic Analyzer Wars?
Published on April 10, 2019
Barbara Aichinger
Vice President FuturePlus Systems

We learned recently that Tektronix has discontinued the last of its logic analyzer family. Sigh….Here at FuturePlus Systems we walked the careful balance between the two Whales, Tektronix and HP/Agilent/Keysight. Mostly siding with the later and only crossing over to the ‘dark side’ at the customer’s request. I remember vividly visiting the impressive Beaverton Tektronix campus, hat in hand touting our superior interposers and hardware skills looking for the elusive key to the Tektronix software development environment so we could sell into that market. Once we started down the Tektronix path we had to carefully dodge the wrath of our best friend Agilent. Like the old Girl Scout song I sang as a child “make new friends but keep the old….one is silver and the other gold”. Tektronix was Silver but Agilent was clearly Gold. 

The wars started in the early 2000’s with one large vendor in particular pitting the two giants against each other. It was brutal with every little technical spec thrown back in our faces as the One Large Vendor led us into the ring to chew each other to death.  As it turns out the One Large Vendor had made a costly mistake…..they never thought that if they pushed too hard one vendor would walk. As it turned out one of them did and the remaining Whale charged big and delivered what ever they wanted. The One Large Vendor was able to entice the other Whale back into service a few years later and the wars heated up again around 2010. Then the Logic Analyzer business began a slow and steady decline. The reasons were many, the advent of Protocol Analyzers, the advances of Simulation and the on-silicon analysis that was being added to many parts.

DDR Memory, was and still is, the last hurray for the venerable logic analyzer. The Tektronix TLA7BB4 cards were a thing of beauty. That 50GHz Magni-Vu…wow I was impressed. Turns out that the engineers at the One Large Vendor loved it too….they hung onto those old 7BB4 cards like a baby binky. They cried when they found out that for DDR4 the reads and writes were at different Voltage Thresholds and that the mighty 7BB4’s could not handle that. Luckily Agilent/Keysight could save the day for DDR4 users with the U4154A cards followed by an even better U4164A card. This was the beginning of the end for the Tektronix Logic Analyzer business. It wasn’t long before the exodus of talent from the Beaverton Logic Analyzer group began. We knew the end was near. At this point Agilent became Keysight and the DDR4 business turned in their and our direction.

Having lived through the wars I have to tip my hat to the hardware engineers at Tektronix. The hardware was great….the software, well not so much. The TLA Software was something that Agilent/Keysight tee’d off on and they clearly delivered a better user experience for both their Channel Partners and their customers.

So who won the Logic Analyzer wars? Keysight.

[0culus]

Wow, that is sad. I have a TLA 715 from the early 2000s. Great little machine for what I need.

[gslick]

One Large Vendor == Intel?

Who else needs the very large numbers of channels at incredibly high speeds, and who would also be considered a large vendor?

I have seen many Agilent 16900 series logic analyzers on the used market with Intel asset stickers on them.

[DaJMasta]

I'd imagine a lot of the memory manufacturers need similar though, intel probably has a huge amount, but anyone working on dense boards can probably use at least a few in development work.


I wonder though, what's used to develop and test high speed, wide channel digital interconnects these days?  Is it all mainframe style systems with robot controlled probes or custom test connectors/boards?  I can certainly see that LAs declined as the stuff being developed started going fast enough to have probing issues with human-operable benchtop style machines, but even with comprehensive simulation, I'd imagine there's still some design work for full blown LAs rather than just a combination of simulation and network analysis to make sure the physical construction is up to snuff.  Is it all just arrays of FPGAs you configure to your need as it arises?

[nctnico]

IMHO the integration and moving to serial busses (both high speed like PCI express and low speed like I2C) to connect between chips have killed logic analysers in general *. I still like the Tektronix logic analysers because of their neat features but the software is just poorly written and sooo slow; it doesn't even load the CPU to 100% when doing off-line analysis.

Edit: and let's not forget digital channels on oscilloscopes which allow to do 95% of what you'd use a logic analyser for on an oscilloscope.

Nevertheless it is an end of an era. I started with the DAS9200, then upgraded to a TLA704 and currently a TLA715.

[tsman]

One Large Vendor == Intel?

Sounds like it. If anybody qualifies as One Large Vendor capable of making those demands then it'd be Intel. I found a Tek presentation which mentions the TLA7BB4 and the example they gave is using it to monitor DDR3 RAM + CPU to IOH on an Intel board with FuturePlus interposers and Intel validation DIMMs.

[effectivebits]

IMHO the integration and moving to serial busses (both high speed like PCI express and low speed like I2C) to connect between chips have killed logic analysers in general *. I still like the Tektronix logic analysers because of their neat features but the software is just poorly written and sooo slow; it doesn't even load the CPU to 100% when doing off-line analysis.

Edit: and let's not forget digital channels on oscilloscopes which allow to do 95% of what you'd use a logic analyser for on an oscilloscope.

Nevertheless it is an end of an era. I started with the DAS9200, then upgraded to a TLA704 and currently a TLA715.

Tektronix actually introduced a really cool serial analyzer that plugged into the TLA mainframe, but it was tied to PCI-Express Gen 2 and couldn't do general purpose serial functions. That would have been an awesome product if they had the foresight to make it more flexible.  Living in the same mainframe meant you could watch data writes into memory and time correlate with the serial bus. In theory.

I think the software was hamstrung because certain large vendors didn't really use it, so the focus was really on raw acquisition performance and support packages for particular applications.  While I was at Tektronix, we had plenty of cool white board discussions about improvements to the base logic analyzer software for various embedded applications such as Digital RF, but the market never really took of for these. We even had a piece of AE-ware that could take digital IQ and create an IQT file to import it into RSAVu.  I may have written a blog post or white paper at some point,but can't find it now. Unfortunately it was klunky and not compatible with SignalVu. Agilent/Keysight did something similar with 89600, but I didn't see a ton of customers using it.

[effectivebits]

Edit: and let's not forget digital channels on oscilloscopes which allow to do 95% of what you'd use a logic analyser for on an oscilloscope.

That's actually what the Tektronix website says - that the replacement product is the 5 series and 6 series.  The 5 series can be equipped with up to 64 digital channels, so if you were just using the logic analyzer as a 1 bit oscilloscope, this likely handles much of the need.  The problem is that it still doesn't have synchronous clocking, conditional/transitional storage, or multi-state trigger.  But since most embedded logic analyzer users just use the "if anything then trigger", you are likely correct.

I did blog on this in 2012 - still true that an MSO is not a logic analyzer, but I think the distinction is missed on most people:
http://www.effectivebits.net/2012/10/putting-logic-in-logic-analyzers.html

[Jaak]

Wow, this sucks... While it's been quite a while since I've been at Tek and followed this stuff, I really enjoyed working with Beaverton to provide solutions to ATI/AMD, and it was fun to have Beaverton staff visit and see hardware in operation that the big company close by, was still running in simulation.   I loved the TLA's, ever since my neophyte training at Hewlett Packard had them claiming they were susceptable to noise from a Piezo lighter.  Having an RF interference background, I questioned the bandwidth capability of the HP LA to capture a very real induced voltage, while the HP staff in Colorado Springs spun it as Tek product fault.    They were not happy when I asked about that, and being a new hire, I STFU as soon as I saw the glares informing me that it was a highly embarrassing question to pose in front of the other new hires.   

So having loved the TLA's for a long time, this is truly sad news.

But that said, it was obvious by the silent tech support killer taking out experienced staff, and new product development answers of "We have to prioritize what we work on." that Tek was pillaged by Danaher, so the damage was done way before Agilent appeared to be winning. 

You can't run against your competitor when the company that bought you, sold off your feet.

[THDplusN_bad]

Good Day,

meh - what has happened to Tektronix' PRODUCT GROUP 54? https://w140.com/tekwiki/wiki/338 

It's just the way it is - everything comes to an end... 

Cheers,

THDplusN_bad