A great selection of NFC and ISO triggers, individual envelope signal calculation, and NFC/ISO measurement features facilitate the evaluation of analog NFC signals and consequently the development and integration of NFC-enabled devices

The SESAMES Award-winning software for design validation of NFC-enabled devices – Design Validation Center – has been extended by another unique feature: an NFC oscilloscope. It is immediately available with Design Validation Center R1.1.

This oscilloscope has the speciality of offering a great selection of various NFC and ISO triggers, which are useful for resolving communication issues on the analog and digital level. “Triggers can be configured on different levels, for example, for carrier modulation, NFC frame start/end, decoder I/O collision or commands like WUPA, to mention only a few of the over 100 trigger conditions. No other oscilloscope can offer that!” explains Ralph Kamp, Business Development Manager at COMPRION.  The envelope calculation can additionally be configured and displayed immediately. All this means that this oscilloscope can be used to measure signals according to NFC, EMVCo, or ISO very easily.

With only two steps to the measurement result

So far, you need a lot of expertise, time, and patience to find analog interference signals in NFC communication using a traditional oscilloscope. Kamp illustrates “It can take hours: configuring the oscilloscope, importing the recorded data into an environment for analysis, calculating the envelope signal, offline decoding.” All this can make the search for a collision in the recording very tedious or even impossible.

Using the new integrated NFC oscilloscope by COMPRION, it takes only two steps to reach the goal:
1) Set high-level trigger
2) Start measurement (single shot or continuous trigger)

The envelope signal and the NFC measurement results are displayed immediately. “This simple approach allows for quickly going through a variety of scenarios with different combinations of analog parameters,” Kamp adds.

Possible applications of the NFC oscilloscope

The NFC oscilloscope facilitates the work of test and development engineers significantly, in particular when they want to optimize the design of NFC-enabled devices or resolve communication issues on the analog level. It is important to identify and resolve problems as early as possible before they cause unnecessarily high costs in later stages of development.