Five Reasons to Upgrade Your Keysight Smart Bench Essentials Workbench With a DAQ

General-purpose test workbenches typically surround their device under test (DUT) with power supplies, function generators, oscilloscopes, multimeters, and more. For an RF DUT, you may need to add RF signal generators and analyzers or network analyzers. For high-speed digital transmission DUTs, you may add high-speed digitizers or oscilloscopes. Your test workbench can easily pile up with instruments and complex cabling to perform your tests.

engineer-testing-PCB-assembly Figure 1. An engineer testing his PCB assembly on a test workbench

What Is a DAQ System?

A data acquisition (DAQ) system is an extremely versatile piece of equipment to complement your test workbench. It measures real-world physical conditions such as temperature, pressure, vibrations, audio, strains, and loads and converts them into electrical signals using various transducers. The signal conditioning circuitry manipulates the raw electrical signal before digitizing it for real-time display, storage, or post-analysis.

core-functions-of-a-DAQ Figure 2. The core functions of a DAQ system

The core functions of a DAQ system are highly versatile. DAQ systems typically have open slots for the following plug-in module types:

matrix-switching-module * Figure 3. A matrix switching module connected to the DAQ mainframe*

Five Reasons to Upgrade Your Workbench With a DAQ

Active-passive-power-consumption-characteristics Figure 4. Use a DAQ to change a DUT’s from active to passive mode for power consumption characterization

automated-test-sequencing-pathwave-benchvue-test-flow Figure 5. Automate test sequences with PathWave BenchVue software

Keysight PathWave BenchVue software eliminates many of the challenges around bench testing. By making it simple to connect, control instruments, and automate test sequences, you can quickly move past the test development phase and access results faster than ever before with just a few clicks.
Dedicated instrument apps enable you to quickly configure the most commonly used measurements and setups for each instrument family. You can rapidly build custom test sequences with the integrated Test Flow app to automate and visualize test results without the need for instrument programming. PathWave BenchVue supports hundreds of Keysight instrument types and models, all from one easy-to-use application.

If you use Keysight’s DAQ970A or DAQ973A mainframe solution, please look for the DAQM904A four by eight two-wire matrix module to concatenate multiple matrix modules together to get a bigger dimension of the matrix. Figure 6 shows you the DAQ mainframe and typical switching modules.

DAQ-mainframe-switching-modules Figure 6. The DAQ970A mainframe with the DAQM904A matrix switching and DAQM901A multiplexer switching modules

If you use the larger capacity 34980A DAQ mainframe, you can use order the 34931A dual 4 X 8 armature matrix module, 34932A dual 4 X 16 armature matrix module, 34933A dual / quad 4 X 8 reed matrix module, or the 34934A quad 4 X 32 reed matrix module.

Summary

The DAQ system test equipment is very versatile to complement all your Smart Bench Essentials test instruments. It makes real-world physical measurements such as temperature, pressure, vibration, audio, and more. It is also a very useful switch matrix or multiplexer system.

The following are the top five reasons to add a DAQ to your test workbench to help you:

To learn more about Keysight solutions, please visit:
DAQ systems
PathWave BenchVue software
PathWave Lab Operations for Remote Learning

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