High speed waveform digitization based on a modified television scanning format

A novel approach to the digitization of waveform displays on oscilloscopes has been developed which uses a modified standard TV scanning format and reduces the data processing requirement to only the information contained in the trace in each frame. This is accomplished by using a standard TV camera rotated 90 degrees so that the display is scanned bottom on top and left to right. The signal output of the camera is processed in real time, i.e., the display is directly digitized and reduced to only the desired information content. Using a standard TV camera, 484 time steps are resolved with an amplitude resolution of 8 or 9-bits. The rate of digitization of the CRT display is up to 30 frames per second, limited by the standard television frame rate. An AT class PC can be used for data acquisition and storage. A single AT is capable of handling up to at least eight frame digitizers at 30 frames per second. The processing method can also include the reduction of a wide or `blumed´ trace to its centroid value with no increase in processing time