EE World met with Ritu Favre, who emphasized a return to the company’s product roots. National Instruments, now NI and a part of Emerson, has a long, dominant history in test and measurement. Best known for LabVIEW graphical programming and its supporting cast of software for instrument control and data analysis, NI was founded in […]
FAQ
How can I quantify a device’s nonlinearity? part 1
You can specify nonlinearity in parts per million or, especially for RF components, in terms of the 1-dB compression point or third-order intercept point.
What’s a half digit and are they all the same?
The most significant digit on a DMM’s display often doesn’t count 0 through 9.
What is intermodulation, and is it good or bad? part 4
Nonlinearities in active circuits and passive components can add harmonic and nonharmonic distortion. This series has investigated intermodulation, the process by which the application of two frequencies to a nonlinear system results in the system generating frequencies that equal the sum and difference of the input frequencies. In Part 1 and Part 2, we looked […]
What is intermodulation, and is it good or bad? part 3
Excel’s charting function adds nonharmonic frequency components to a cosine wave. In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, we looked at intermodulation — what it is and how to apply it to frequency-translation tasks. We concluded Part 2 with an image like Figure 1. We had begun with a 1,200-kHz carrier with two […]
How to build and manage a top-notch test team
Test engineering requires more than technical skills to build a successful team and complete projects on time and within budget.
What is intermodulation, and is it good or bad? Part 2
A mixer can upconvert and downconvert a modulated signal with no loss of baseband information. Part 1 of this series described intermodulation resulting from the combining of two or more sinusoidal signals through a nonlinear device such as the mixer in Figure 1. The mixer’s output is the product of its two inputs, and its […]
What is intermodulation, and is it good or bad? Part 1
Sinusoidal inputs applied to a nonlinear system produce an output containing different frequencies, and the results can be good, bad, or ugly. According to the dictionary definition, intermodulation is “the production in an electrical device of currents having frequencies equal to the sums and differences of frequencies supplied to the device.” In the literature of […]
Why does the Fourier transform provide apparently inaccurate results, and what can I do about it? part 4
The FFT can measure phase angle, but what appears to be a meaningful result might just be the arctangent of a ratio of rounding errors. Throughout this series, we reviewed the fast Fourier transform (FFT) as implemented in Microsoft Excel and investigated windowing functions. In this final part, we’ll cover phase measurements, but first, let’s […]
How to separate differential and common-mode harmonic noise currents
Differential-mode and common-mode currents can cause your product to produce radiated and conducted emissions. These three techniques can help you measure them.
