The Practicing Instrumentation Engineer

Steve Hageman - May 30, 2012

The "Practicing Instrumentation Engineer" covers topics that come up in the daily working lives of engineers who work on instrumentation products. These can include sensors, hardware design, embedded systems and firmware - all the way to PC side applications.

Steve Hageman is Principle Engineer at Analoghome.com and provides custom design services for RF/analog and embedded electronic products.

Op amp noise revisited - the nuts and bolts

05.03.2013

A question arose about the model input current noise generator shown in my previous post and whether it should properly be modeled as an independent current source for the plus and negative inputs. An excellent question. Read More...

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Simulating op amp noise

04.09.2013

With visualization tools and a simple way of simulating op amp noise with TI's Tina SPICE simulator, designing for low noise is much faster and surer than with previous cut and try methods. Read More...

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Visualize op amp noise

03.15.2013

Picking a low-noise op amp is easier then ever, yet somehow harder also. The Visual Spreadsheet presented here makes the selection of an op amp for any given source resistance and frequency much easier. Read More...

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Via spacing on high-performance PCBs

02.06.2013

What is the proper via spacing for a PCB and what happens if we get it wrong? Read More...

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Use a DVM to directly digitize low-frequency noise (Part 3)

01.14.2013

In the last two articles I showed how a modern 6-1/2 digit DVM could be used to measure 0.1 to 10-Hz noise. I have since made a number of improvements to my noise measuring application – and a number of mistakes along the way. Read More...

Use a DVM to directly digitize low-frequency noise (Part 2)

12.05.2012

Here we take a look at verifying the performance of the Agilent 34401 DVM when used as a low-frequency waveform analyzer with sampling rates of over 1000 readings/second. Read More...

Use a DVM to directly digitize low-frequency noise (Part 1)

11.15.2012

Jim Williams was right - the only way to really be sure of your peak-to-peak noise specification is to make many readings and run a statistical analysis to see if the measurements are really random or something else. Read More...

Compiler optimizations

10.09.2012

I'm mostly an Analog type of guy, but I write code and I do my share of embedded design. It's hard to ignore the power that those little single chip processors give us in our complex analog designs. Read More...

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A trip through Quality - Part 3

08.10.2012

“Rule of thumbs" are easy to remember and can help during the design or analysis process. However, some are apt to scaling errors or are overly pessimistic, or are just plain dubious at best. Read More...

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A trip through Quality - Part 2

07.10.2012

In Part 2 we will look at a technique that will actually uncover quality issues early on and allow them to be fixed before production starts. Read More...

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A trip through Quality - Part 1

06.19.2012

When I first started out in Electronics I worked for a small company making Modular Instrumentation Products. A job came by that wanted a "MIL-STD 217 Calculated MTBF." I was handed a copy of the standard and told to make a report for my design. Read More...

What is a "Practicing Instrumentation Engineer" anyway?

05.30.2012

We have products to build and schedules to keep so we are practical, we are also in the instrumentation business so we need to understand the end-to-end performance of our products from the sensor input, through the hardware, then through the software to finally the customer output. Read More...

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