Hidden Anomaly Location: HAL™
The ultimate risk-management technology
Serious risk management...
Find subtle waveform anomalies the moment you probe your signal
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The Hidden Anomaly Locator (HAL) does for you what an expensive signal integrity consultant who needs no sleep or rest would do. It employs all of the depth and power of M1 OT's 100s of built in measurements, multiple measurement domains, and the myriad of the product's other unique and innovative methods of analysis to automatically detect waveform anomalies in the background and alert you to them. You don't have to be specifically "looking for" a particular type of problem, as with other 'event scanning' products. You don't even have to have a single measurement turned on. HAL's got your back.
Upon discovery of any of the dozens of waveform anomalies that HAL knows how to find, it presents details on what it found such as location within the acquisition and the degree to which the anomaly is present. This analysis-of-the-anomaly phase of the HAL process is intended to reveal more information that might be useful in getting to the root cause of the anomaly. However, on the screen(s) that present the details of each anomaly is a button that will take the user to an entry in the Waveform Integrity Knowledge Base that describes a number of possible causes for that specific anomaly. This is a Wikipedia-like database which can be added to or refined over time by anyone in the M1 OT™ user community.
HAL has multiple Agents, each of which looks for a particular type of problem. Agents belong to groups, such as Voltage or Clock, for convenience. You can enable or disable individual Agents, groups of Agents, or all Agents as needed. If there are no problems, you probably won't even know that HAL is around. But if a measurement seems to be having a problem, HAL will let you know. You can get details on what HAL has noticed by opening HAL's display window and clicking on the Details button for the Agent that noticed a problem. You will then see a message describing the anomaly in detail, along with an annotated graphical view of the relevant data.
Some Agents relate only to an active measurement, while others can run at any time. In addition, some Agents look at trends that develop over multiple acquisitions, while others look at the information within single acquisitions. Taken all together, they represent a powerful "CT scan" of your signal.
The initial release of M1 Oscilloscope Tools™ v5 contains a significant collection of Agents, and additional Agents will be created and released by ASA as they are developed. It's also possible for the interested user to create their own Agents to be used with HAL. Some of the pathological conditions that the initial collection of Agents will be looking for are:
Obviously there are issues in waveforms that will stimulate multiple agents simultaneously. ASA has established as an area of ongoing engineering study the development of Agent-management methodologies that report only the essential root causes and best practices for establishing trigger points. Hidden Anomaly Location is both a fertile area of study and a brand new technology, and ASA is looking forward to making contributions to this technology long after this initial release.
