7000 series readout system

work in progress

For the 7000-series scopes, a system was required to display the instrument state such as input range, time/div etc. alongside or within the display. Earlier solutions had included fiber-optical/mechanical displays to the side of the CRT such as those in the 576 Curve Tracer.

The design ultimately selected for the 7000 series was proposed and designed by Barrie Gilbert. It uses the CRT beam to display annotations in the same focal plane as the scope's main display.

Layout

A total of eight display fields can be superimposed on the CRT picture, four on top and four at the bottom. These are logically associated with the four possible slots in full-size mainframes, with the top field corresponding to the first channel, primary timebase or primary function of a plug-in, and the bottom field corresponding to a second channel, delayed timebase, secondary function or unit label.

Mainframe circuit

The oscilloscope readout system produces a pulse train consisting of 10 successive negative-going pulses representing a possible character in a readout word, and is assigned a time-slot number corresponding to its position in the word. Each time-slot pulse is output at -15 V onto one of ten lines, labeled TS-1 through TS-10 (Time Slots 1 through 10), which are connected to the vertical and horizontal plug-in compartments.

Two output lines, row and column, are connected from each channel (two channels per plug-in compartment) back to the oscilloscope readout system. Data is encoded on these output lines as a pair of ten-level analog current sequences, which can address a matrix of 10 × 10 positions, of which about half correspond to characters whereas others encode instructions.

The character generators are custom analog chips that provide X and Y output currents for eight points inscribing each character. The output values are generated by different emitter areas in transistors. Each chip encodes ten characters.

Plugin circuit

A plug-in encodes the desired read-out information either by connecting resistors between the output lines and the time-slot input lines, or by generating equivalent currents.

A simple plug-in such as a vertical amplifier will only require a small number of resistors and possibly diodes in addition to a suitably coded switch. It will use TS1 to encode the number of zeros, TS2 to display a down-arrow indicating an inverted input, TS3 to display ">" or "<" if the input is uncalibrated, TS4 for a digit, TS8 for a unit prefix like "μ" and TS9 for a unit like "V". The other slots are unused:

Simple readout encoding circuit. Switch positions shown create readout of "100 μV". (Click for full size.)

Custom chips

• 155-0014-01 Analog to Decimal Converter
• 155-0015-01 Analog Data Switch
• 155-0017-00 Zero Logic Counter
• 155-0018-00 Zeros Logic
• 155-0019-00 Decimal Point and Spacing
• 155-0020-00 Output Assembler
• 155-0021-00 Timing Generator

• 155-0023-00 Character generator (Numerals 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9)
• 155-0024-00 Character generator (Special Symbols ↓ < I / + - + C Δ >)
• 155-0025-00 Character generator (Prefixes m μ n p x k M G T R)
• 155-0026-00 Character generator (Letters S V A W H d B C Ω E)
• 155-0027-00 Character generator (Special Alpha U N L Z Y P F J Q D)

Literature

• Barrie Gilbert, Monolithic Analog READ-ONLY Memory for Character Generation, IEEE J. of Solid-State Circuits, 1971.