Design and VLSI Implementation of a Digital Oscilloscope

Abstract

Oscilloscopes are indispensable tools for anyone designing, manufacturing or repairing electronic equipment. In today's fast-paced world, engineers need the best tools available to solve their measurement challenges quickly and accurately. As the eyes of the engineer, oscilloscopes are the key to meeting today's demanding measurement challenges. There are many types of oscilloscope available in the market. The main types of oscilloscopes are analog oscilloscope, digital oscilloscope and PC based oscilloscope. From which the digital oscilloscope are widely used now a days due there accuracy portability, high speed, high resolution, data storing capability etc. here we provide an alternative solution which is basically a digital oscilloscope with almost all the control options which any standard digital oscilloscope has. It has basically three large blocks, first is the ADC part which has the analog to digital IC which convert the analog input signal into digital. This IC is controlled by the STK500 AVR kit. Second is the oscillator control part which is implanted on the FPGA Spartan 3 kit. It has the entire storage element and the user input control and driver part of IC and VGA. The third large block is display device which is a CRT monitor means the waveform result is shown on CRT monitor along this the LEDs and seven segment display part on FPGA is also used to display information. So this is a cheap alternative to expensive oscilloscopes, using a VGA display and a simple mouse interface, a user can use this scope to look at and measure signals up to about 80 MHz if an extra high frequency clock will provide to the design.