9 Important Things to Know When Making Sensitive Measurements with Oscilloscopes

We've routinely posted on how you can characterize your total measurement system to gain important "situational awareness" when using an oscilloscope to make sensitive measurements. The knowledge gained from these tests helps you properly interpret your measurement results so that you can deduce what is actually going on with your circuit, versus what is an artifact of the measurement system. Listed here are nine important things you should know before making sensitive measurements with your oscilloscope, with links to blog posts that instruct you how to test them.

Situational Awareness: RF Noise in the Lab

Fig. 1. Time domain (top) and spectral (bottom) views of
signal shown in SPECTRUM-1 on a WaveSurfer 4000HD. 

Laboratories have multiple sources of RF that can affect measurements, like computers, cell phones, routers, local radio and TV stations, even a nearby airport. Knowing the RF background of your lab is another part of Situational Awareness. Only by knowing the background can you know what is actually due to the device under test.

One way to read RF is through spectral analysis of Fourier transforms (DFT and FFT). FFTs take a time domain view of a signal (e.g, amplitude versus time trace) and change it into a spectrum of amplitude plotted as a function of frequency. Frequency spectrums are great for observing signals than are asynchronous with the process being measured. They have a lower noise floor and offer better dynamic range than do time domain plots.  Consider the views of the same signal shown in the time domain and frequency domain in Fig. 1.

Squeezing More Bandwidth From a 10x Passive Probe

Figure 1: Shown is a comparison of inherent oscilloscope
noise and noise at the shorted tip of a 10x passive probe

Now that we have a better understanding of what's happening under the hood of a 10x passive oscilloscope probe, we can sum up its key characteristics. The first thing to know about such probes is that they offer relatively low bandwidth (<100 MHz). This is largely a result of the probe's tip inductance.

Power-Rail Noise: Small Signal, Big DC Offset

Figure 1: Your
scope's vertical
adjust has its
limits

We've been working through the various challenges in making power-rail noise measurements. One of those challenges is RF pickup that can often swamp the noise signal, and the way around that is to ensure a coaxial connection from the oscilloscope's input down to the power rail itself. We want a high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), so we're better off with a 1X probe than with a 10X attenuating probe. We want high bandwidth, so we want a 50-Ω termination at the oscilloscope input.

Understand RF Pickup When Measuring Power Rails

Figure 1: Teledyne LeCroy's
HDO8108A sports a very low
noise floor of about 145 μV 

Measuring the noise on a power rail seems to be a straightforward task. However, there are some basic pitfalls that can cause incorrect, or even downright strange, results. Let's look at one of these challenges: RF pickup. We'll demonstrate the effect of RF pickup on a power-rail measurement, and then we'll show you an effective means of mitigating that effect.