Debugging systems that use an RS-232 serial bus can be difficult, unless your scope is capable of triggering on and decoding the RS-232 protocol. Traditional methods of debugging serial buses such as RS-232 include manual bit counting. But this visual technique of counting “1s” and “0s” can be tedious and it is prone to errors.

Agilent Technologies’ serial bus options for InfiniiVision oscilloscopes offer powerful triggering and provide unique hardware-accelerated decoding to help you debug embedded designs with RS-232 and UART serial buses faster. With the industry’s fastest serial decode update rates, you can more easily find and debug random and intermittent errors and signal integrity problems that you could easily miss using other serial bus decode tools.

Other oscilloscope solutions with serial bus triggering and protocol decode typically use software post-processing techniques to decode serial packets/frames. Using these software techniques, waveform- and decode-update rates tend to be slow (sometimes seconds per update), especially when you use deep memory, which is often required to capture multiple packetized serial signals.