National Instruments and Tektronix collaborate to provide the industry's most seamless benchtop oscilloscope-to-PC connectivity
National Instruments has announced SignalExpress Tektronix Edition, interactive PC-based measurement software for design and test engineers who need to quickly acquire, analyse and document measurements on the benchtop without programming.
Through USB plug-and-play control, SignalExpress Tektronix Edition features seamless connectivity to the new Tektronix DPO4000 series oscilloscopes and AFG3000 series waveform generators, providing engineers with a fast and easy means for connecting to and controlling Tektronix instruments.
Engineers have traditionally relied on manually transferring data from their benchtop instruments to PCs using floppy disks and USB memory devices for offline analysis and reporting.
With SignalExpress Tektronix Edition, they can now significantly improve their measurement productivity by connecting their stand-alone instruments to PCs and performing instant control, measurement analysis and documentation.
This removes many of the time-consuming challenges engineers have faced when performing benchtop measurements and online analysis in the lab.
With USB plug-and-play connectivity, the software immediately detects the Tektronix DPO4000 oscilloscope and Tektronix AFG3000 waveform generator and with one simple mouse click, engineers can configure the instrument communication while accessing a live view of the captured waveform data and generated signals.
In addition, they can use the intuitive, drag-and-drop configuration environment to significantly increase their measurement productivity by performing more online data capture, measurement analysis and documentation, resulting in an overall shorter time to measurement.
"Thousands of Tektronix oscilloscope users control their instruments with National Instruments Labview," said Craig Overhage, Tektronix senior vice president, instruments business.
"National Instruments has drawn from its leadership in instrument control to create SignalExpress Tektronix Edition, which offers seamless benchtop oscilloscope-to-PC connectivity to improve the productivity of customers without requiring programming.
"SignalExpress Tektronix Edition can help engineers maximise the full potential of the new Tektronix DPO4000, which is designed to meet the most pressing needs of embedded systems design engineers".
With SignalExpress Tektronix Edition, engineers can access more than 200 measurement, processing, analysis and reporting capabilities to apply to live data acquired from the most common Tektronix oscilloscopes and signal sources via USB, GPIB and ethernet/Lan.
SignalExpress offers these advanced analysis and reporting capabilities as well as automated sweeping and limit testing features to relieve engineers from these traditionally manual and tedious processes.
"National Instruments has been committed to instrument control over the last 30 years," said John Pasquarette, NI director of software marketing.
"With the recent release of the Labview 8 graphical development platform, NI introduced new instrument control features, including automatic instrument recognition and driver retrieval as well as a wizard that automates driver development.
"Now, working closely with Tektronix, a leader in oscilloscopes, we have taken virtual instrumentation to the design bench with an interactive software approach".
The SignalExpress Tektronix Edition Base version ships as part of the standard configuration with the Tektronix DPO4000 series oscilloscopes.
Engineers also can upgrade to the Professional version for advanced signal processing, analysis, documentation and connectivity to more than 300 common stand-alone and modular benchtop instruments.
