Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Amy J who wrote (58024)	5/13/1999 1:49:00 AM
From: Mani1	Respond to of 1572508

Here is something a little interesting, AMD's chips in HP's O'Scopes. Really low ASP and low volume, but interesting, techweb.com HP builds up muscle of Infinium scope Stan Runyon Palo Alto, Calif. - Hewlett-Packard Co. has upgraded both the software and hardware in its HP Infinium oscilloscope. The improvements are being offered at little or no cost to users. The software update, Version 3.0, boosts performance, enhances waveform viewing and provides at-a-glance quantitative information. The hardware update hoists disk and RAM storage capacity and stretches CPU clock speed to 300 MHz. In addition, a new communications mask kit makes it simple to perform industry-standard ANSI, ISU and IEEE tests. With the new software, or firmware, users can opt for color-graded persistence as a way to observe waveforms in the so-called third dimension. That is, they can spot signal anomalies and how often they occur. With new vertical and horizontal histogram capabilities, they can pin down the statistical behavior of noise and jitter over time, including mean, standard-deviation and peak-peak values. "There's a 21-bit counter behind every pixel," said product manager Tim Coll. Also included in V3.0 are eye-diagram, automask and custom mask measurements. For eye patterns, the user simply clicks the mouse button a couple of times, and eye height and width, jitter, crossing percentage, Q-factor and duty-cycle distortion are made available. In Automask, the user draws a mask around a known-good waveform and sets the desired tolerance in divisions or volts/time, and departures are immediately signaled. Custom masks can also be loaded from ASCII text files designed off-line to do the same thing. Hardware upgrades include the new LS-120 Super Disk drive, a 120-Mbyte floppy that is backward-compatible with standard floppies. The advantages are that users can back up setups, waveforms and other images and that software upgrades become simpler. Infinium users also have a choice of three CPU classes-133, 200 or 300 MHz-using the latest AMD Pentium-class processor. Claimed benefits include improved waveform update rates and measurement speeds. Finally, the new mask test kit includes the software and adapters needed to ease the job of compliance testing. The adapters are said to ensure the proper terminations when connecting to the scope. The software includes a library of standard mask templates. To simplify the mask set-up, a feature called "isolated ones triggering" eliminates the need to stimulate the device under test with a known-good pattern. A one-button mask-alignment feature automatically fits the mask to the test waveform, so that no manual scope adjustments are needed, according to HP. The communications mask kit sells for $3,000 but is free to those with a scope shipping date between Feb. 1 and Oct. 31, and half-price until Oct. 31 to those whose scopes were shipped before Feb. 1. Version 3.0 software is free to registered Infinium owners and can be downloaded from www.hp.com/info/Infinium25.