Can an oscilloscope be used as a digitizer?
The fastest oscilloscopes and digitizers typically use parallel flash converters and 8-bit resolution. 8-bit or 256-level digitization is enough to express a relatively smooth and easy-to-understand waveform display. Therefore, why not use a digital storage oscilloscope (DSO) as a digitizer, especially for high-speed signals, both instruments are difficult to obtain a resolution of more than 8 bits. In fact, the results are satisfactory, but there are exceptions. Oscilloscopes are discontinuous acquisition instruments and digitizers may not be that. After an oscilloscope captures a signal and then captures more signals, there needs to be somewhere to put the data, unless continuous waveform acquisition is used to store the data into a pixel image at a TV-like frame rate. Such acquisition and equivalent display rates are high, but the data format makes further external analysis extremely data intensive. In addition to the above special processing, the oscilloscope can only continuously acquire and display signals at a very low speed.
Digitizers can achieve continuous throughput rates of 100MS/s or higher, limited only by the speed of the memory bus. For example, a digital plug-in card for the PCI bus has a data transfer rate of 100MB/s, and the PCI bus can work up to 66MS/s (132MB/s). The throughput rate of an oscilloscope is limited by the data processing speed of the slower, lower I/O capabilities. Slower digitizers and data loggers can write data directly to the hard drive, archiving several gigabytes of data, while oscilloscopes typically only top out at 16MB. If you look at data transfer rates on the other hand, many applications only need to capture infrequent data, but these bursts may be close together. At this time, it is very important to transmit data records quickly. Such signals have applications such as high pulse repetition frequency (PRF) scanning radar, time-resolved ultrasonic sonar, time-of-flight mass spectrometer, and nucleon counting.
