Electronic Specifier caught up with Rohde & Schwarz at Hardware Pioneers Max in London recently, speaking to two specialists about the trends shaping EMC testing and oscilloscope design, and the products the company is bringing to market to address them.
In-house testing on the rise
Nathan Reeve, EMC Product Specialist at Rohde & Schwarz UK, described a shift in how manufacturers approach compliance work. “Manufacturers [are] investing more to be able to do more in-house pre-compliance type testing,” he said, contrasting today’s landscape with a time when EMC testing was largely outsourced to dedicated test labs. He called the move towards in-house testing “really, really advisable and recommended if you want to have success in your compliance testing.”
At the centre of that shift is the company’s newest EMI test receiver, the EPL. Reeve explained that the unit was designed with flexibility in mind: “It’s got a modular, flexible design concept, so you can buy a base model … which is a pre-compliance only unit, and then it can be scalable, and you can upgrade it later to a full compliance unit.” The EPL also incorporates FFT technology to accelerate testing, alongside debug tools such as a real-time spectrogram.
On the software side, Reeve highlighted ELEKTRA, the successor to the company’s long-running EMC32 platform, which he said has “over 1,000 installation locations worldwide.” ELEKTRA’s headline features include multi-band measurement, allowing several frequency ranges to be tested simultaneously on the emissions side, and multi-carrier testing for immunity work. Where traditional methods test one frequency at a time with a vector signal generator, Reeve said the new approach can “test multiple carriers at the same time and slash in half your test time.”
Asked what sets Rohde & Schwarz apart, Reeve pointed to customer input as the driving force behind development: “We’re an engineering company. We take feedback from the industry, and … some of the things that we’ve implemented in our software and our receivers are really based on feedback that we get.”
Power electronics push oscilloscope capability
The conversation then moved to the company’s MXO oscilloscope range, discussed with Nick Le Bas, Lead Application Engineer for Oscilloscopes. Le Bas identified power electronics as a major driver of change in his field, with engineers chasing “much more efficiency, much more electronics, and much smaller compact space.” That drive brings its own measurement challenges, particularly around capturing fast-switching signals. “We’re seeing an increase in frequency at switch mode power supplies [and] brand new semiconductor materials,” Le Bas explained, which creates difficulty in “how to capture these very high dv/dt signals,” especially when a small differential signal needs to be measured in the presence of a much larger common-mode voltage.
The MXO 3 and MXO 5 ranges, four- or eight-channel oscilloscopes, were built to address exactly this. Le Bas credited a custom-built ASIC for the performance gains, the product of roughly five years of R&D, enabling around four and a half million acquisitions per second on a 12-bit ADC, extending to 18-bit in HD mode. He described acquisition speed as the scopes’ defining advantage: “That acquisition speed is world-leading,” he said, adding that the FFT capability can process 45,000 FFTs per second, a feature demonstrated live on the stand in an EMI debug setup.
For Le Bas, the eight-channel variant in particular stands out for power electronics engineers, giving them the channel count and acquisition speed needed to characterise increasingly complex, high-frequency designs.
Both specialists pointed attendees to the Rohde & Schwarz website, or their local account manager, for further information on the EPL receiver, ELEKTRA software, and MXO oscilloscope range.
