Tektronix releases Educator’s Resource Kit

BANGALORE, INDIA: Tektronix Inc. has released a comprehensive new Educator’s Resource Kit that uses hands-on problem-based laboratory experiments to teach students the fundamentals of test and measurement for basic electronics.

The kit is designed to help ensure that students are prepared to be immediately productive in the workplace and able to use the latest in test and measurement instrumentation.

Virtually every electronic product developed today is an embedded system and may contain microprocessors, microcontrollers, DSPs, RAM, Flash, EEPROMs, FPGAs, A/Ds, D/As, serial and parallel buses, embedded audio and switch-mode power supplies.

Students need to be trained on the test equipment and procedures used to design and troubleshoot these multi-component embedded systems. The labs in the Educator’s Resource Kit address the most common challenges faced in the electronics industry today.

“With the rapid pace of change in the electronics industry, educators are finding it increasingly challenging to keep their curriculum current with the latest advances. Staying current is particularly important, and daunting, in embedded systems design,” said Bob Bluhm, vice president and general manager, Value Oscilloscope Product Line, Tektronix.

“The Educator’s Resource Kit offers an easy-to-implement method to keep electrical engineering curriculum up to date. We’ve had a long history of partnership with leading educational institutions throughout the world, and this is the most recent product of those relationships.”

The new kit provides a complete set of instructional materials to upgrade lab curriculum to feature the latest and most commonly used test equipment. Materials include six different scalable, problem-based laboratory experiments with an instructor’s guide and student reference fact sheet for each experiment, a training board to provide real-world signals for the lab experiments and an Oscilloscope Reference Guide that mounts directly on the oscilloscope and details the common controls and features of today’s digital oscilloscopes.

Labs span such topics as Introduction to Oscilloscopes, Introduction to Arbitrary/Function Generators, Parallel and Serial Bus Analysis and Debugging a Digital Design.

The labs are built around the popular Tektronix MSO/DPO2000 Series oscilloscopes. In addition to basic oscilloscope functions and features, the MSO/DPO2000 oscilloscopes deliver advanced capabilities, such as up to 16 digital channels, deep memory and serial and parallel bus decode.

With the industry’s lowest price for such advanced capabilities, the MSO/DPO2000 Series is an ideal choice for budget-conscious educational institutions.

In addition to the new Educator’s Resource Kit, Tektronix is also offering a free Fundamentals Library of 15 technical papers covering basic concepts to advanced test and measurement techniques.

For example, Oscilloscope Fundamentals explains how oscilloscopes work, describes different types of oscilloscopes, outlines electrical waveform types, reviews basic oscilloscope controls, and explains how to take simple measurements.