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Logic Analysers

Authors:
Geoffrey Hunter
Geoffrey Hunter
Published On:
Nov 22, 2015
Last Updated:
Nov 7, 2025

Logic analysers are electronic tools which connect to digital circuitry (well, and analogue). Their primary purpose has been to capture digital signals and provide higher level analysis of the signals, such as decoding communication protocols. They are similar to oscilloscopes, but are usually designed to be connected to a computer and don’t typically have the high bandwidth (>100MHz) of an oscilloscope. The lines between the two are blurring, with many logic analysers now offering analogue waveform capture, and many oscilloscopes now offering digital signal analysis (sometimes as an additional module/license --- these fees can add up!).

Saleae

Saleae is probably the most expensive well-known logic analyzer brand. As of April 2020, the 8-channel, 500MS/s (Samples/second), 100MHz, USB3.0 Saleae logic analyzer (the Logic Pro 8) will cost USD$699, which is quite a lot of money for JUST a logic analyzer.

Capturing two analog waveforms with the Saleae Logic 8.

In November 2025 (this is when the software to support the Logic MSO was made completely public) Saleae also released a family of mixed oscilloscope/logic analysers called Logic MSO (mixed signal oscilloscope). They offer dedicated analogue channels with oscilloscope probe hardware. These analogue channels have a much higher bandwidth (100 or 200 MHz) and sample rate (1 or 1.6 GS/s) than the analogue channels on the Logic Pro family (which typically have a sample rate of 50 MS/s). The analogue channels can also support a much higher voltage at ±30V\pm30V at the connector input, which means ±300V\pm300V with the provided 10:1 probes. There are 9 and 12-bit vertical resolution options.1

A photo of the 4-channel, 100MHz Saleae Logic MSO.1

DreamSourceLab

DreamSourceLab provides the DSView software for viewing the digital signals from the DSLogic series of logic analysers. DSView is compatible with Windows, MacOS and Linux. It uses the sigrok project to provide all of the protocol decoders and therefore supports many of the protocols listed on https://sigrok.org/wiki/Protocol_decoders.

A screenshot of the DSView v1.1.2 software.

Whilst a setup .exe is provided for Windows and a .dmg for MacOS, no pre-built executables are provided for Linux, and you have to build yourself from the source code. Easy instructions are provided in the INSTALL text file.

Footnotes

  1. Saleae. Technical Data Sheet - Logic MSO [datasheet]. Retrieved 2025-11-07, from https://downloads.saleae.com/specs/logic_mso_data_sheet.pdf. ↩ ↩2