EE Times Ultimate Product Award
Names M1 OT Top
T&M Software
In their June 23rd issue, EE
Times announced the Ultimate Product Award winners for the 2nd
quarter of 2008, and ASA is proud to announce that M1 Oscilloscope
Tools was the highest-ranked software product in the Test &
Measurement category (3rd overall). We won on the strength of
our unique Hidden
Anomaly Location (HAL) technology and other elements of Embedded
Intelligence included in M1 OT.
"It's
sincerely appreciated when your customers acknowledge your hard work
for an award like this." according to Mike Williams, President and
Chief M1 Product Designer. "Everyone on the M1 Product Team puts in
long hours to create a product that is vastly different than what
ScopeCo is offering and customers are definitely 'getting it'. While
this award was for our work on HAL and other embedded intelligence
features that give the user a full partner when they're working
their way through waveform data, there's a lot more going on in this
product and the underlying business model. It really pays to have a
well-developed model for what customers do with waveform data
overall instead of thinking only about the what the operator is
doing while he's staring into the scope. M1 is the only product that
actually has an architecture to serve a rich customer and
organizational usage model, and awards like this show that insight
is paying off."
Thanks to all of you who voted...we're proud to set
this up next to all the other awards that M1 has won through the
years.
Announcing M1 Oscilloscope Tools™
v5.02
Powerful Unique New Waveform
Decode Functionality
The decode capabilities in M1
Oscilloscope Tools allow you to view encoded waveforms in terms of
what they're doing, and then apply the powerful debug, analysis and
embedded intelligence of M1 to get to the bottom of problems you see
in decode mode. Currently supported decode types includes 8B10B,
CAN, LIN, FlexRay, I2C and SPI. With the current version of M1, you
can now view encoded waveform behavior in powerful new ways.
When you're trying to get to the
bottom of a problem in your encoded waveform, being able to see when
things happen... what values are present or not present... how often
certain values or groups of values come up, can provide important
insights into rapidly drilling down to the source of the problem.
The current release of M1 OT has several unique views to do this,
which include viewing your encoded waveform fields (address, data,
control when appropriate) versus time (i.e. see when that
value/values occur) as well as viewing how the range of values
distribute in a histogram.
Another useful
new exploratory mode occurs when searching for values of a field
(e.g. frame starts, data values, addresses, R/W, etc.). Decode
Search in M1 allows you to search on individual or multiple values,
for example, multiple address values for I2C or multiple PID valus
in a LIN waveform... you can move from one specific event to another
and M1 will keep the decode-timing view synched with the M1
ScopeView as well as any other vs-time views. This will allow you to
rapidly associate potentially pathological waveform features by
their proximity to the event. These unique insights can be the
difference in rapidly finding the root cause of a problem vs
lingering on it for days.
In the example above, M1 is shown decoding FlexRay
data. In the top view, a histogram shows the distribution of
Data Bytes we have seen in this acquisition, while the 2nd view
shows those data bytes in the order that they occurred. Note
that this TimeView is synched to the ScopeView at the bottom using
M1's Sync Axes feature, allowing you to correlate information across
domains via the ScopeTrack box. In the tab, the Search
dropdown shows that we can search for Frame Start events, Byte Start
events, or one or more Data Byte values. The Decode Tab is
also where the Decode TimeView and HistoView at the top of the
screen are opened and closed from.
Eye
Mask Multi-Margin
For quite a while now, M1 has
included a Margin value on the Eye Mask tab. If your signal
satisfies the chosen mask, the overall margin is shown - i.e. the
percentage by which the entire mask can be scaled up before any
failure is found.
This capability has now been
enhanced in M1 OT v5.02 with the new Multi-Margin readout. In
addition to the Overall Margin, separate margin values are now also
shown for Top, Bottom, Left, and Right. These represent the
amount that the actual eye could be expanded in that direction
before a failure is found. By clicking on the button for a
particular margin type, the margin mask for that type will be shown
graphically.
This feature can improve your
understanding of eye mask results, allowing you to see exactly where
your signal is performing well and where it may be close to
failure.
New
Compliance Test
ASA has tests for many
popular standards available for free
download from our website for any user of M1 OT.
The newest addition to this growing collection is FB-DIMM.
We've also upgraded several older TestScripts to bring them up to
newer versions of the relevant standards. Remember, if you
need a test that we haven't written yet, you can use M1 and
ScriptBuilder to create
it yourself in a matter of hours.
Want to Contribute to the Single Most Innovative Tool
in
the T&M Industry?
Are you an M1 user that appreciates the kind of
rich innovation flowing into the product like HAL, and the
"mega-efficient user interface" (to quote one of you) or an Rj/Dj
scheme that actually respects physics and has been validated at
someplace other than the sweet spot of the core algorithm? Do you
support The Revolution we're leading against trace innovation, weak
thinking, lame proprietary tools and predatory, anti-customer
business practices at ScopeCo? Do you think there's more
contribution a tool maker can give than sending a talking haircut
from marketing to the committee meetings so they can say they went?
I'm working on Version 6 and 7 while our engineers are working on
extending HAL and Version 5, and one of the things I've noticed in
recent customer visits is that there are some pretty smart guys
using our tools that seem to want to contribute to the innovation
storm. We have a VERY good system already as you can tell (http://www.m1ot.com/why-m1-oscilloscope-tools.htm),
and a rich roadmap of capabilities that will continue to impress...
but you can never go wrong by adding a smart guy or two to the
circle.
This is not about recreating the "focus groups"
ScopeCo uses to find their software ideas, and we aren't looking for
people that have ever been part the ScopeCo focus group process.
We're also not looking for engineers who serve on any "technical
committee" However, if you are actually prone to fits of rage when
you think about what the committees have done to the practice of
engineering (plunged our industry into a literal Dark Age), you
might be what we're looking for (passionate thinkers).
So, with that said, if you'd like to get inside
the fence and be a contributor to the best tool on the market,
here's what I'm looking for. You're a long-time M1 user. You KNOW
the tool and you get the vision. You have no idea what a "1" or a
"0" is. You're THE go-to guy at your end for measurement, debug and
engineering. You're articulate and you take pride in your work. You
don't want for "ideas" both in your field and in others, but most
importantly, your ideas work more often than not. You think about
products in terms of user impact rather than lines of C code, or
committee requirements. You're not a geek anymore and Shackleton
would have hired you. If this is sounding like you, shoot an email
to info@m1ot.com with "To Mike W" in the subject. Tell me how
you'd like to contribute and a little bit about yourself, and we'll
talk. Keep in mind... product design (content, direction, vision,
etc.) is not a democratic process here, but we value great ideas and
passion. If selected, you'll need to sign an NDA and bring some good
ideas to the table. We'll share our model/insights around
measurement workflow and our architecture for satisfying that (NONE
of the scope companies have these things). You'll get to work with
the "engineering versions" of M1 with advanced features and modes
that haven't been released, and provide feedback on what you like
and don't. I hope to hear from you.
Mike
Williams
President and Chief M1 Product
Designer
Employment
Opportunities at ASA
ASA Corp. is currently seeking
imaginative electrical or computer engineering programmers to join
our team. These individuals should have solid programming and test
equipment experience, but more importantly, be willing to bring
energy and the passion to dominate the industry to ASA.
ASA is also looking to fill
the position of Marketing and Public Relations. Qualified candidates
will have a degree in Communications, Marketing or related field.
If you're interested in
employment at ASA click
here for more information or send
an e-mail with your resume to: jobs@Amherst-Systems.com.
