Pico breaks 100,000 waveforms per second barrier

Pico Technology says the latest version of its PicoScope 6 software outperforms any other PC oscilloscope on the market, and even some expensive benchtop oscilloscopes. "When you are looking for an intermittent glitch, a faster waveform update rate lets you find it more quickly," said managing director Alan Tong. "PicoScope's new fast persistence display mode can collect thousands of waveforms per second, overlaying them all with colour coding or intensity grading to show which areas are stable and which are intermittent. Faults that previously took minutes to find now appear within seconds." The new fast persistence mode is available on Pico oscilloscopes from the PicoScope 3000 series upwards with the PicoScope R6.10.2 beta software or later. Using dedicated hardware inside the scope, this mode can achieve update rates up to 120,000 waveforms per second on USB 3.0 deep memory scopes such as the PicoScope 6000C/D Series. With USB 2.0 deep memory scopes, the update rate can now reach 80,000 waveforms per second. Even faster capture rates are possible using rapid trigger mode, which collects bursts of up to 10,000 waveforms at a rate of up to 1million waveforms per second into segmented memory for later viewing.