Picotech -- micro-tech and oscilloscope

Pico Technology has been manufacturing PC-based instruments for data acquisition since 1991. PC-based test and data acquisition equipment is quickly emerging as the most cost-effective approach to high quality instrumentation and the oscilloscopes from Picotech being one of them.

They come from integration of several instruments into single small units that can be on a notebook or a desktop. The oscilloscopes come with a PicoScope software, which turns a PC into an oscilloscope, spectrum analyser and a meter at the same time.

Other than the portability, the oscilloscopes from Picotech have several advantages. The advantages over conventional instruments range from multiple viewing of the same signals and on-screen display of voltages and times, annotation of waveforms with notes, printing, saving and export options to other supporting applications.

A built-in advanced display and automatic trigger modes capture infrequent events such as fluctuation in waveforms. On user demand, duty cycles and rise times of waveforms may be displayed on screen. Automatic parameter measurement is another approach that makes these small instruments rise above any conventional equipment. The company also offers free recent upgrades of the unit through their website (www.picotech.com).

These low-cost oscilloscopes do not require any external power supply as they attain the power needed directly from the PC parallel ports, making the device portable with notebook usage. Depending on the quality and prerequisites of sampling to be taken, Picotech offers a wide range of oscilloscopes with different specifications. The resolution of the display ranges from 8 to 16 bits and the sampling rate varies from 20 thousand to 10 billion samples per second. Along with an available bandwidth of 200MHz and a 1 MB buffer memory, a built-in signal generator (1 KHz) and a high-speed 2.0 USB (480 Mb/s) make these instruments one of the finest in micro-technology.

Uses for such PC-based oscilloscope may range from medical centres to the electrical laboratories in the educational and governmental institutions. Depending on the built-in specifications of these oscilloscopes, the price ranges from around USD 500 to USD 1400, which at the least halves the traditional oscilloscope prices, or may be beyond. Today's digital world claims a digitised replacement of traditional electronics and Picotech oscilloscopes are surely making such attempts. These units have yet to capture a mass market of replacement, but with such high quality design specifications it will not be too long before they will do so.