At Embedded World 2026, I stopped at the Tektronix booth and watched a demo that stuck with me.
Not because of the hardware on the table. Not because of the brand.
Because of what problem it was trying to solve.
The Setup
On the wall behind the demo station, a panel read: The Essentials for Test & Design Engineers
Below it, a demo directory — six use cases:
- 3-Phase PWM / DQ0 Analysis
- Automotive Ethernet Debug
- CAN FD / XL Advanced Debug
- EMI / EMC Pre-Compliance
- RF Signal Monitoring
- Wireless Transmitter Validation
Six use cases. One instrument. That's the pitch.
But the more interesting story is why these six things are listed together in the first place.
Domain 1: CAN FD / CAN XL Bus Debugging
The left screen was showing a live CAN decode. Frames scrolling in real time — ID, DLC, Payload, CRC, ACK. Coloured packets. Timestamp on each line.
This is exactly what automotive ECU debug looks like in the field.
When an ECU misbehaves, the first question is always: what was on the bus at that moment? Not just the signal shape — the actual frame content.
CAN FD pushed the data rate from 1 Mbit/s to 5–8 Mbit/s. CAN XL goes further — up to 20 Mbit/s. At these speeds, you need protocol decode, filtering, and frame-level search built into your instrument.
Modern oscilloscopes do this natively. The decode table sits right below the waveform. You find your problem frame in under a minute instead of over an hour.
Domain 2: RF Spectrum and Wireless Validation
The right screen was running a DPX Spectrum view. Centre frequency: 2.434 GHz — that's Bluetooth.
The display showed frequency vs. time, peak hold, and real-time density — the kind of view that catches intermittent signals that a static spectrum sweep would miss entirely.
Most embedded engineers don't own a dedicated spectrum analyser — they have an oscilloscope. So Tektronix built spectrum analysis into the oscilloscope. You switch modes, not instruments.
For automotive specifically, Bluetooth and WiFi are now standard in every new vehicle. Validating them from the same bench setup where you're already debugging CAN removes a whole context-switch from the workflow.
Domain 3: EMI Pre-Compliance Testing
The third screen showed an EMC-EMI measurement interface — CISPR limits overlaid, frequency sweep running, pass/fail markers active.
Pre-compliance testing is one of the highest-ROI activities in embedded hardware development. A formal EMC lab test costs between €5,000 and €20,000. If you show up and fail, you go back, fix the board, and pay again.
Pre-compliance with an oscilloscope isn't a substitute for the real certification. But it finds the obvious problems before you've paid lab fees to discover them — switching noise, clock harmonics, CAN transceiver radiation. All catchable on the bench.
Why These Three Domains Are Together
This is the part that the Tektronix wall panel is actually saying — even if it doesn't say it directly.
In a modern automotive system, CAN, Bluetooth, and EMC are not independent problems. They are the same problem viewed from different angles.
A CAN frame error might look like a logic bug. But the root cause might be conducted noise from a motor controller — noise that shows up in the EMI scan before it shows up in the protocol decode.
A Bluetooth degradation might look like an RF problem. But the actual cause might be a switching regulator with a harmonic landing on 2.4 GHz — a harmonic that was already visible in the oscilloscope waveform, if you were looking.
Separating these into three different instruments doesn't just slow things down. It makes the correlation between domains nearly impossible.
The Instrument on the Table
The main unit in this demo was the Tektronix 5 Series MSO — Mixed Signal Oscilloscope. Below it, a compact RF front-end module to extend the spectrum measurement range. A laptop running SignalVu and TekScope for PC-side analysis.
The system is modular. You buy the oscilloscope, then unlock the capabilities you need through software licences: CAN decode, Automotive Ethernet, Power analysis, EMI, RF spectrum.
This is the current business model: the instrument is the platform, the software is the product. And notably, many software option packages cost more than the oscilloscope itself.
What This Means for Test Engineers in 2026
- Bandwidth specs matter less. Nobody at this booth was talking about 20 GHz or 50 GS/s. They were talking about Automotive, EMI, Wireless, Power. Application-first, not specification-first.
- Software is the differentiator. Two oscilloscopes with identical hardware can behave completely differently depending on which software options are installed.
- Multi-domain debugging is now the baseline. If your oscilloscope can only show waveforms, it's behind. CAN decode, spectrum mode, and EMI measurement are becoming table stakes.
- Pre-compliance is a workflow, not a lab activity. Engineers who run pre-compliance checks on the bench are shipping hardware with fewer costly respins.
Final Thought
The most interesting thing about this demo wasn't any single measurement. It was the assumption underneath it: that an engineer working on a CAN-connected, wirelessly-enabled, EMC-regulated system needs to see all of those things simultaneously.
Because in real systems, problems don't stay in one domain. They interact.
And the tool that lets you see the interaction — not just the isolated symptom — is the one that actually helps you debug.
Photo: Thomas · @SignalByThomas
Equipment: Tektronix 5 Series MSO · RF Front-End Module · SignalVu / TekScope · Embedded World 2026, Nuremberg
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