PicoScope 3000 Series

HAL3 hardware acceleration

Many oscilloscopes struggle when deep memory is enabled: the screen update rates can slow and the controls can become unresponsive.

The PicoScope 3000 Series oscilloscopes avoid this limitation with the use of a dedicated hardware acceleration engine. This parallel design

enables the oscilloscope to intelligently compile the waveform image from the raw data stored in its memory before transferring it to the

PC, so that the USB connection and PC’s processor performance do not limit capture rates. This allows the continuous capture and display

of over 440 000 000 samples every second. PicoScope oscilloscopes manage deep memory far more effectively than competing PC-based

and benchtop models.

The PicoScope 3000 Series is fitted with third-generation hardware acceleration (HAL3), which allows high waveform update rates and

faster segmented memory and rapid trigger modes. In most cases the data collection speed of the PicoScope will be faster than the USB

transfer rate, so information has to be buffered in high-speed memory on the device. HAL3 allows even deep-memory PicoScopes to

maintain fast waveform update rates regardless of the buffer size.

For example, the PicoScope 3206D can sample at 1 GS/s on timebases as long as 20 ms/div, capturing 200 million samples

per waveform, and still update the screen several times per second. That’s around 500 million sample points each second!

Less intelligent oscilloscopes attempt to reduce the amount of data transferred by using simple decimation, transferring only every nth

sample. This results in the majority (up to 99.999%) of data being lost and a lack of high-frequency information. PicoScope deep-memory

oscilloscopes perform data aggregation instead. Dedicated logic divides the memory into blocks and transfers the minimum and maximum

values of each block to the PC, preserving the high-frequency detail.

For example, a waveform with 100 million samples may be divided into 1000 blocks of 100 000 samples each, with only the minimum and

maximum values for each block being transferred to the PC. If you zoom into the waveform, the oscilloscope will again divide the selected

area into blocks and transfer the minimum and maximum data so that fine detail is viewable without any delay.

In the example above, both waveforms show the same signal using different types of hardware acceleration. The top waveform has used the

aggregation possible with a PicoScope, and as a result the high-frequency spikes are preserved. The bottom waveform has used traditional

decimation, showing a loss of high-frequency information.

In parallel with the data aggregation, other data such as average values are also returned to speed up measurements and to reduce the load

on the PC’s processor.