Pico Technology
Pico Technology is a supplier of PC based products including PicoScope, Pico Data Loggers and the PicoVNA Vector Network Analyzer.
Pico Technology Test & Measurement products are used by scientists, technicians, engineers and researchers to troubleshoot their designs and validate performance of their systems with precision and within budget.
PicoScopes capture and display complex waveforms that are the heartbeat of next generation electrical and electronic technologies. They address many challenges with mathematical waveform analysis tools, decoding of popular serial communication protocols, and mixed-signal capabilities that span analog/digital, serial/parallel, high-speed (to 1GHz) and high-resolution (to 16 bits) technologies.
Pico data loggers enable multi-channel recording of scientific and engineering parameters such as temperature (to 0.015 °C accuracy), voltage (to 0.1% accuracy and 24 bits resolution), current, force, strain, vibration and many others. Alarms can be set to warn or take action on measurements that are out-of-limits. Annotations can be made during recordings to aid documentation of the results.
Pico radio frequency (RF) products include a vector network analyzer (VNA) that is invaluable for characterization of high frequency communications networks and numerous other applications including materials and life sciences research. Pico sampling scopes offer bandwidth to 25GHz for characterization of high speed data networks and transmission lines.
Pico Technology Test & Measurement products are used by scientists, technicians, engineers and researchers to troubleshoot their designs and validate performance of their systems with precision and within budget.
Rather than using bespoke hardware, Pico Test & Measurement products are “PC based”, meaning that they employ industry standard computer hardware and software for control, display and results analysis.
Benefit of this approach is that the instruments are more compact and less costly than traditional benchtop instruments. It also means that users can upgrade their computer at any time to take advantage of processor performance improvements. Pico also provide free-of-charge updates to the application software throughout the lifetime of the instrument.
For OEM requirements and users who need to write custom applications a Software Development Kit (SDK) is freely available. The SDK for PicoScope includes drivers for Windows, macOS and Linux, including Raspberry Pi and Beaglebone. Example code, hosted on the Pico Technology GitHub pages, shows how to interface to third-party software packages such as Microsoft Excel, National Instruments LabVIEW, MathWorks MATLAB and programming languages including: C, C++, C#, Visual Basic .NET and Python.
Using PC based oscilloscopes, data loggers, VNA's etc., enables a high performance instrument to be bought at a fraction of the cost of a bench stand-alone item and upgraded as new PC technology becomes available. This means that limited budgets do not limit the quality of the test equipment that can be bought.
Written by Ian Poole .
Experienced electronics engineer and author.
