RS-232/UART Protocol Triggering and Decode for Infiniium 9000 H-Series Oscilloscopes

Easily debug and test designs that include RS-232/UART using your Infiniium 9000A and 9000 H-Series oscilloscopes

Lower-speed serial bus interfaces such as RS-232 and other UART (universal asynchonous receive and transmit) interfaces are widely used today in electronic designs. In many designs these serial buses tend to provide content rich points for debug and test. However, since these protocols transfer bits serially, using a traditional oscilloscope has limitations. Manually converting captured 1’s and 0’s to protocol requires significant effort, can’t be done in real-time, and includes potential for human error. In addition, traditional scope triggers are not sufficient for specifying protocol-level conditions. Extend your scope capability with the Keysight Technologies, Inc. RS-232/UART Triggering and Decode application. This application makes it easy to debug and test designs that include RS-232/UART protocols using your Infiniium 9000A and 9000 H-Series oscilloscopes.  

Set up your scope to show RS-232/UART protocol decode in less than 30 seconds. 

• Get access to a rich set of integrated protocol-level triggers.
•  Save time and eliminate errors by viewing packets at the protocol level. 
• Use time-correlated views to quickly troubleshoot serial protocol problems back to their timing or signal integrity root cause.  

RS-232/UART setup and triggering

 Get access to a rich set of integrated protocol level triggers. The application includes a suite of configurable protocol-level trigger conditions specific to RS-232/UART. When serial triggering is selected, the application enables special real-time triggering hardware inside the scope. Hardware-based triggering ensures that the scope never misses a trigger event when armed. This hardware takes signals acquired using either scope or digital channels and reconstructs protocol frames. It then inspects these protocol frames against specified protocol-level trigger conditions and triggers when the condition is met. Keysight’s protocol viewer includes correlation between the waveforms and the selected packet. The selected packet, highlighted blue row in the listing, is time-correlated with the blue line in the waveform display. Move the blue tracking marker in time through waveforms and the blue bar will automatically track in the packets window. Or, scroll through the packet viewer and highlight a specific packet. The time-correlation tracking marker will move to the associated point in the waveform.