Make Better Noise and Ripple Measurements on DC Voltage Rails

Keysight Technologies

Make Better Noise and Ripple Measurements on your DC Voltage Rail

Three reasons Keysight oscilloscopes and probing solutions can help you

Greater measurement confidence

With the B-Series oscilloscope and N7020A power rail probe, you can confidently identify whether or not your power rail is within tolerance.

Gain more insight to your signal

The B-Series oscilloscope and N7020A power rail probe allows you to zoom-in on power rails to look for and measure transients, ripple, and noise in greater detail.

Easy noise and transient evaluation

Evaluate and understand high-speed noise on your DC power rails more easily than ever before with the B-Series oscilloscope and N7020A power rail probe solution.

Power rail voltages and tolerances are getting smaller. You need to measure those voltages and make sure they are within the tolerance band you have been given in order to ensure that your product will work as intended.

With traditional measurement systems whose noise approaches the tolerance levels of the power rails, accurately measuring periodic and random deviation on the DC voltages can be a difficult to impossible task.

See your signal instead of oscilloscope and probe noise

1. Confidently identify whether your power rail is within tolerance

A low noise measurement solution is important because you don’t want to confuse the noise of the probe and oscilloscope with the noise and ripple of the DC supply being measured. Additionally, anytime something is attached to a circuit, including an oscilloscope or other measurements system it adds loading and noise. Loading can affect DC supply behavior and ultimately can make measurements inaccurate.

Keysight’s solution has extremely low noise. The N7020A power rail probe only increases the baseline noise of the oscilloscope by 10%. And when used with the Infiniium S-Series oscilloscope, you have a high signal-to-noise ratio at small vertical settings and full 10-bit ADC support. In addition, the N7020A probe has very low DC loading due to 50 kΩ DC input impedance.

2. Zoom-in on power rails to look for and measure transients, ripple, and noise

Without being able to move the signal to the center of the screen, you must have the oscilloscope at large volts per division, which decreases the sensitivity and increases the noise of the oscilloscope relative to the signal. Placing a DC blocking capacitor in the signal path eliminates the offset problem, but also eliminates relevant DC information such as DC supply compression or low frequency drift.

With ±24 V of probe offset, Keysight’s solution offers a large offset. This enables you to center the signal on screen, while placing the oscilloscope at its maximum vertical sensitivity to zoom in on the signal and confidently see any transients, ripple or noise present there.

3. Evaluate and understand high-frequency noise and transients on DC power rails

Ripple, noise, and transients riding on DC supplies are a major source of clock and data jitter in digital systems. Dynamic loading of the DC supply by the processor, memory, or similar items can occur at the clock frequency and create high-frequency transients and noise on the DC supply.

The N7020A power rail probe has 2 GHz of bandwidth to enable you to see the transients you need to, no matter where they come from.