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Students who attend a study program dedicated to technical sciences, are often required to analyze embedded communication interfaces, measure duty cycles of rectangular signals or test the digital inputs and outputs. In order to complete these tasks, it is advantageous to have a logic analyzer. As part of the research process, courses at the university were precisely analyzed. The result of this analysis is represented in Table V.

The OpenLab Signal Toolkit offers a logic analyzer measurement device. Figure 7 shows the block diagram of the logic

analyzer hardware platform. This hardware add-on communicates via USB with the PC application, which is described in section IX-E. Hence, the hardware consist of a powerful microcontroller LPC1837 [13] from NXP [12], which is a Cortex-M3 based μC. Based on the USB high-speed connection the sample data are transferred to the PC application. This μC provides an internal USB bootloader, which makes it easier for students to perform a firmware upgrade. This computation performance of the μC is required, because the sample frequency is 10 MHz and no external RAM should be used. The absence of an external memory reduces the costs significantly. A current limitation and an input ESD (Electrostatic Discharge) protection circuit, protects the μC. Additionally, the hardware platform provides 8 logic level pins and connectors for typical embedded communication interfaces. These inputs can be used as outputs as well. This means the logic analyzer can be configured to a pattern generator, and the hardware platform does not need to be changed. In pattern generation mode, students are able to define logic patterns, communication interface messages which are applied to the outputs of the hardware platform.

1. NXP: NXP microcontrollers product page [Online] https://www.nxp.com/products/processors-and-microcontrollers:MICROCONTROLLERS-AND-PROCESSORS

2. NXP: LPC18xx ARM Cortex-M3 microcontroller User manual Rev. 3 [Online] https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/user-guide/UM10430.pdf