Product Charting

M1™ Waveform Tools™ is a fundamentally different product from those sold by major scope manufacturers. We think our vision of what a scope application can and should be is larger and more complete than other offerings. For a long time, we could not illustrate how much more M1 Waveform Tools does. Much of that expanded capability was so radical that it was very unlikely that a customer would easily be able to comprehend it, which made illustrating the "costs less, does more" difference a challenge. Traditional tools like brochures weren’t effective.

Finally, Mike Williams, ASA's founder, came up with the idea of "product charting." We use this method to help engineers understand the significant differences between M1 OT and those applications that one might consider competitors. With product charts, we can illustrate those significant differences at more than one level; they reveal what major areas of functionality within a scope application (e.g. debug, automation and productivity, platform compatibility, etc) are addressed, as well as how completely that application provides functionality within a particular area. Product charting gives you a conceptual view of a product quickly and visually. Here’s what the product chart for M1 Waveform Tools looks like.

Click to enlarge...

The periodic chart does a great job of classifying elements of similar qualities by using regional coloring, shape and position, so we borrowed it. In M1, there are 8 broad categories of capabilities that contribute to the usefulness of the tool to the customer, as indicated by coloring:

Within each of these eight broad areas are individual cells that represent important specific capabilities. In some cases, particular columns denote sub-categories (e.g. Rj/Dj, a particular manufacturer of scopes, etc.). We won't go into detail here on what every cell means; for that, we have an explorable version of the product chart where you can click on individual cells and understand each in detail. But as an example, if you look in the green area, you can see columns that represent Yokogawa, LeCroy, Agilent and Tektronix. In those columns there are entries for which scope families M1 supports. As another example, in the purple area (analysis) under the Jitter1 column, you can see M1 does the following: cycle-cycle analysis (Cc), phase-noise measurement (Pn), jitter spectrum computation (Fft), etc.

Compare and Analyze the Product Charts of Jitter Solutions (1.1 MB .pdf file download)

While simple visual comparison between the product chart of one scope application and another can dramatically show the differences between the two, we have also created some metrics to quantify and understand the gap.

Raw Product Content Metric

The raw Product Content Metric (PCM) is intended to be a fundamental measure of “bang for the buck.” It’s simply the number of cells the scope application populates in the product chart. Sometimes you find a partial or marginal capability in a product, and that is denoted on the product charts by a “*LIM” notation. We weight a marginal capability entry at 0.5. Note also that some regions of the chart are not included in the raw PCM; the “noble” column is covered by our product philosophy and is excluded. We also do not include the green area (supported scopes), since that would give an unfair advantage to M1. Finally, we do not include the portfolio, as this only concerns the particular application in question.

Customer Product Content Metric

Virtually all other scope applications are proprietary; they often are not only specific to a manufacturer, but to a subset of the scopes the manufacturer makes or used to make. Therefore, the raw PCM isn’t able to characterize the impact of the difference between the product on the customer's perceived experience. Customers often use several scope families from different manufacturers, so the customer PCM is the product PCM multiplied by the number of scope families that it supports. We feel that this metric is the true measure of what engineers should be looking at with regard to product charts.

Index of Inventive Difference

We think inventive difference is important to you because you need to know if the tools you adopt will continue to be enhanced and expanded in the future. The Index of Inventive Difference is intended to illustrate the inventive difference between two scope applications. We define it as the difference between the raw PCM of one chart and the raw PCM of the other. When comparing products that are contemporaries of each other, the difference will illustrate which product introduces new capabilities first; this is what we define as being "inventive."

Click here to view product charts comparing M1 Waveform Tools to specific competitive products.