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CX3300A Series Device Current Waveform Analyzer

Data Sheets

CX3300A Series Device Current Waveform Analyzer

Measure dynamic current and voltage with confidence

The Keysight CX3300A series is an all-in-one measurement and analysis solution to solve your power rail, power delivery network, and power integrity challenges. The CX3300A series integrates an oscilloscope’s bandwidth and sampling rate, a DMM’s sensitivity, and data logger’s extended duration measurement recording with waveform analytics to reveal accurate current and voltage waveforms.

Key Features

  • Wide bandwidth at 200 MHz
  • High-resolution/high-speed sampling at 14-bit (1GSa/s)/ 16-bit(75MSa/s)
  • Low noise and a wide dynamic range with high sensitivity from sub-nA and sub-μV
  • Long-duration measurement capabilities up to 100 hours maximum
  • Waveform analytics, current profiler and more efficient analysis functions on mainframe and PC

Power Rail Characterization

IoT (Internet of Things) requires various devices to sense and process the data and to connect with the network. Accordingly, IoT increases the number of embedded electronic components dramatically — it is critical to optimize the cost, power efficiency, and reliability.

Next-generation devices for IoT operate for an extended period at lower supply voltage and power. These devices have integrated capabilities for function, performance, network connectivity, and cybersecurity. These devices are typically configured by power source, DC/DC converter, power management IC, ASIC/MCU, sensor, display, wireless circuit block, and more. The devices are programmed to operate intermittently through the mode transition among idle/sleep/dormant, power-on (wake-up) and active to extend the device operating time at lower supply power.

Characterizing the power rail current and voltage is critical to reveal how the device operates to improve the performance and optimize the circuit design to ensure reliability. For example, the power rail current and voltage characterization help the R&D engineer to perform these tasks:

  • Validate the circuit design against the component margin, peak, and inrush current
  • Monitor the power consumption trend for mission-critical devices such as a pacemaker
  • Characterize, debug, and optimize the power consumption along with firmware power management for controlling active to sleep operation
  • Design power rail design with precise current and voltage waveform both for power integrity
  • Determine the problematic device behavior that is not visible by voltage measurement
  • Detect a malicious code execution such as the side-channel attack for cyber-security

How to Solve Power Rail Challenges

The current waveform quickly changes from sub-μA to mA, depending on the device operation. A digital multimeter (DMM), current probe, and differential probe on a shunt-resistor are standard tools to measure current. However, these conventional instruments are getting insufficient to capture the dynamic current and voltage waveforms on the power rail due to trade-offs with bandwidth, sampling rate, sensitivity, and noise.

The CX3300A series — CX3322A with two channels, and CX3324A with four channels —are solutions to help you measure dynamic current and voltage characterization. They integrate the advantages of an oscilloscope’s bandwidth and sampling rate, a DMM’s sensitivity and low noise, and data logger’s long-duration measurement in a single instrument. It enables you to characterize power rail, power integrity, or dynamic current and voltage behavior for a broad range of devices more accurately, precisely, and quickly than a measurement performed by other conventional methods.

Dynamic Current Measurements

A DMM or oscilloscope with a current probe or differential probe are commonly used to measure the current, but there are trade-offs with bandwidth, sampling rate, sensitivity, and noise. The comparison between the CX3300A and conventional measurement tools are shown in Figures 5 and 6. In some cases, multiple instruments are required to characterize the device comprehensively, or a single instrument is used for characterization. However, it is challenging to identify a potential design failure using a single instrument.

CX1101A single-channel current sensor

The CX1101A is an essential current sensor used for various applications. The unique current sensing technology suppresses the higher frequency noise.

CX1102A dual-channel current sensor

The CX1102A dual-channel current sensor enables simultaneous measurements under two different measurement ranges. For example, the primary channel is set to a 20 mA range, while the secondary channel automatically sets to a 200 μA range. This setting enables the sub-μA measurement, which is the primary channel’s range — and is 50 to 100 times larger than that of the secondary channel. This current sensor is very useful for low-power applications because it has an intermittent operation between sleep/standby and active states.

CX1103A low-side current sensor

The CX1103A provides wide bandwidth and low current sensitivity that is useful to measure the current flowing into the circuit common ground. The CX1103A can cancel the DC offset current, and measures low-level dynamic sensor current signals on large DC current.

CX1104A selectable shunt current sensor

CX1104A enables accurate dynamic current measurements up to 15 A with a wide dynamic range down to 1 μA level sensitivity. It requires a resistive sensor head calibrated at Keysight.

CX1105A ultra-low noise differential sensor

The CX1105A ultra-low noise differential sensor measures a differential voltage across your shunt resistor on an evaluation test board. It performs a non-intrusive current measurement. The measurable voltage converts into current on the CX3300A’s mainframe by entering the value of the shunt resistor. Figure 13 shows the measurement example of 1 mV peak waveform performs the low noise temperate testing in the chamber.

CX1151A passive probe interface adapter

The CX1151A is a passive prove interface adapter allows you to use a regular passive probe for voltage measurements to take full advantage of CX3300A’s 16-bit high-resolution ADC and low noise.

CX1152A digital channel for the CX3324A

The CX1152A digital channel helps you with digital triggering — up to 8 channels to measure current synchronized with digital signals such as the controller’s I/O or data bus. Unlike conventional digital probes, each probe for the CX1152A has 10 MΩ input resistance, which enables you to make accurate low power measurements by minimizing the load current.

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