Patent ID: 7072804

Claim:
Real time data acquisition apparatus comprising: an analog to digital converter that receives an applied signal to be acquired, the analog to digital converter producing, at a rate consonant with Nyquist requirements for a selected bandwidth, a sequence of digital numeric values corresponding to the time variant behavior of the applied signal; an acquisition memory coupled to the sequence of digital numeric values and that stores them as they occur; a digital trigger filter coupled to the sequence of digital numeric values and responsive to numerical value variations in the sequence of digital numeric values by producing a sequence of digitally filtered numeric values; a digital trigger comparator coupled to the sequence of digitally filtered numeric values and that produces a trigger signal when an excursion in the numeric values of the sequence of digitally filtered numeric values meets selected threshold, slope and hysteresis criteria; and wherein the acquisition memory stores a selected number, including none, of further entries in the sequence of digital numeric values subsequent to the occurrence of the trigger signal.