High-Speed Time-Domain Measurements—Practical Tips for Improvement

Making accurate high-speed time-domain measurements can be challenging, but finding information that will help improve one's techniques shouldn't be. Understanding the basics of oscilloscopes and probes is always helpful, but a few extra tricks of the trade and some good old-fashioned commonsense engineering can be employed to help yield quick and accurate results. The following are some tips and techniques I've accumulated over the past 25 years. Incorporating even a few of these into your measurement kit could help improve your results.

Simply grabbing a scope off the shelf and a probe from the drawer won't do for high-speed measurements. When choosing the right scope and probe for high-speed measurement, first consider: signal amplitude, source impedance, rise time, and bandwidth.

Reproduced with the permission of Analog Devices, Inc.