Reliable verification of circuit operation with multimeters with data logging capabilities.
By Trevor Smith, Director of Oscilloscope Market Development at Tektronix.
Translated and adapted by Juan Ojeda of AFC Ingenieros SA (jojeda@afc-ingenieros.com)
As embedded system circuits become more sophisticated and tolerances tighter, new problems arise during design debugging and validation. Parameters such as short-term stability, drift, and jitter must be measured to understand the behavior of a circuit over time. Elusive issues like transients and spurious issues can set projects back days or weeks if not found quickly.
To troubleshoot sporadic problems and measure the behavior of measurement devices over long periods of time, engineers must capture and analyze thousands of measurement data. This requires logging large amounts of data or tracking measurement trends in the time domain, something traditional precision and digital multimeters are unable to do.
