In this episode Shahriar reviews the ITECH IT9121 Digital Power Meter. The IT9100 power meter series can provide up to 1000Vrms and 50Arms and measurement bandwidth of 100KHz. The instruments can measure voltage, current, power, frequency, harmonics and other parameters. The standard configuration includes USB, GPIB, RS232 and LAN communication interfaces and also interfaces for USB-based peripheral devices. The basic voltage and current accuracy is 0.1%.
In this episode Shahriar reviews the latest addition to the Keithley Graphical SMU family. The Keithley 2470 SMU offers 1100 V and 10 fA capability and is optimized for characterizing and testing high voltage, low leakage devices, materials, and modules, such as Silicon Carbide (SiC), Gallium Nitride (GaN), power MOSFETs, transient suppression devices, circuit protection devices, power modules, batteries, etc. This review is organized as follows:
00:00 – Introduction, SMU comparison, Power Envelope
02:34 – Instrument front & back overview
06:43 – Brief teardown and internal design overview
12:29 – GUI overview, high-voltage capability & interlock function
14:45 – High-voltage leakage measurement, capacitor leakage, polarity reverse at 1000V
20:12 – Varistor characterization on two quadrants, graphing capability
26:09 – Gas discharge tube characterization, stress testing & cursor measurements
30:47 – Multidimensional sweep using Kickstart software and CMOS sub-threshold measurement
41:32 – TSP script building, programming multiple SMUs with feedback functions
46:07 – Concluding remarks
In this episode Shahriar describes the operation of the vintage HP frequency meter devices. These instruments were designed in the mid-1960's and offer extremely good performance. The principle operation is based on a quarter-wave tuned cavity which is mechanically adjusted with high precision. The cavity is coupled to the through line which causes a dip of about 1.5dB at resonance.
The internal structure and design challenges are presented. A frequency meter is then used to measure a single tone and two-tone signal with impressive accuracy. The scaler transmission response of the frequency meter is also presented.
In this episode Shahriar takes a look at the design and performance of the open-source ALK-PT1 passive probe. This probe uses is based on a classical transmission line feed structure and has gone through many iterations to improve its performance. The design tradeoffs of various passive probes are explored and the performance of the ALK-PT1 is measured both in S-parameters domain and time domain using NRZ serial data at various data rates.
The Signal Path (TSP) is a science & electrical engineering video blog for industry professionals, researchers & students. TSP is a not-for-profit website dedicated to provide free education spanning a wide range of electrical engineering & science topics. Equipment reviews, tutorials and repair videos are posted regularly.