Amherst Systems Associates, Inc. (ASA Corp.) started in 1985 as an engineering consultation firm specializing in the development and application of technologies for high-precision waveform timing and measurement. Its founder, Mike Williams, has guided the company to become the primary innovator and industry leader in clock, timing, jitter and serial data measurements. ASA Corp invented and distributes the largest family of software analysis tools that work on all real-time oscilloscopes. Called, M1 Oscilloscope Tools™ users get the most imaginative, most feature-rich, most correlatable, least expensive and most capable software tool for their real-time scopes. Just one M1 Oscilloscope Tools™ license replaces 6-8 software tools made by others. Scope manufacturers, like Agilent and LeCroy, have recognized the contribution that ASA Corp brings to the industry by OEMing M1™ and reselling them direct to their customers.

The most popular T&M instrument in computers, serial data, consumer electronics and semicon is the real-time oscilloscope (RTO). A profound trend in the scope industry is the use of application software packages that make a general purpose instrument, an application-specific solution. A lab may buy 5 or more brand-proprietary software applications every 2 years for each RTO, at $6K to $12K per app.

ASA Corp has provided the industry with the inventive force behind the initial idea and popularization of scope apps via ASA's M1 Clock and Timing Analysis tools.

In early '05, ASA Corp completed a 2-year design of a new and imaginative way for engineers to employ their RTOs.

While previously M1 did only timing analysis, M1 Oscilloscope Tools is a standard full-featured RTO interface that runs on any brand RTO. It extends the user's abilities in important ways that did not previously exist.

One of the most important ideas in M1 allows the user to click together any compliance test in minutes using an intuitive graphical API. This shifts the ability to create tests directly to the customer. Rather than waiting 9-12 months for the scope companies to maybe create it, you get it right now.

But M1 Oscilloscope Tools also provides the industry with an R&D productivity thrust also. A new capability called M1 Reader let's the engineer do remote offline or Online analysis from his desk, flexible result reporting, uncommon ease-of-use so that non-expert users get expert results, and the ability to share tests on all their scopes without cost or other hindrances directly or via ASA's ScopeApplications.com.

M1 costs less than the proprietary tools that do just one thing and in fact, it is the first and only software tool for scopes that offers, "scalable pricing" so its cost is always in scale with the scope on which it will run.

M1 has a jitter decomposition capability called SEEj that also comes from years of science done at ASA Corp. They studied the effects that seem to destabilize every other approach out there and built SEEj to avoids those pitfalls. A validation engine was built that simulates a huge jitter space broken into millions of regions. This was used to train a neural net to minimize the error at each point across all of jitter space to about 5%. The result is the only Rj/Dj solution available that runs on all RTOs, which is a pretty strong correlation story.

T&M companies actively support ASA to ensure M1 runs with their RTOs because they have influential customers that use the scope primarily to run M1. Agilent and LeCroy have agreed to make M1 their principle stand-alone jitter application.