Finding Intermittent Events

Figure 1: Statistics for 1261 Width measurements
taken over 97 acquisitions on the Measure table.
Width statistics can help determine the set up
of a Glitch SmartTrigger.

Glitches, dropouts, runts, aperiodicity, missed cycles, slow edges—whatever you call them, they are irregular waveform elements that can wreak havoc with you circuit operation. Because they do not occur with regularity, they can be hard to find and correlate with whatever synchronous events may be causing them. How can you use your oscilloscope to easily find intermittent events where they occur? The answer is by judicious application of the oscilloscope’s measurement statistics and SmartTriggers®.

Don't Just Trigger, But Trigger Smart

Figure 1: The runt pulse and non-monotonic edge anomalies
in this signal are not apparent with a simple edge trigger.

In an earlier post, we looked at some of the basics of oscilloscope triggering and noted that there are two broad classes of triggers: simple triggers that sense particular characteristics of the input signal (transition edges, pulse widths, and so on), and more complex triggers that let you zero in on more specific attributes of the signal based on timing and amplitude parameters.