Oscilloscope Measurement Tools to Help Debug Automotive Serial Buses Faster

The primary reason engineers use oscilloscopes to debug and characterize automotive serial buses is because of an oscilloscope's inherent ability to characterize the analog quality of these signals. Performing analog characterization using an oscilloscope is often referred to as "physical layer" measurements. Serial bus protocol analyzers are optimized at performing measurements at the "application layer". Instruments such as these are focused on providing trace flow of data at a higher abstraction level—but at the cost of providing little or no physical layer measurement capability. Agilent's InfiniiVision Series oscilloscopes offer some unique measurement capabilities for debugging and characterizing the physical layer of automotive serial buses.