Have you ever created a complex arbitrary waveform only to find out that despite all
of your painstaking efforts to be very precise and exact you realize that you need to make
one little change and have to create a whole new arb? I'm going to show you how Trueform
Waveform generators can help you re-use, re-sort or trigger your arb waveforms to build a whole
new signal instead of starting from scratch. Let's go to the computer.
I have a couple of arb waveforms that I've created to perform dropout testing on the
bench. The first one I'm going to open is just a normal sign wave. Once I load that
into the BenchLink Waveform Builder Pro software I can control how I want to set up my sequence.
This is going to be the first arb in my sequence and I want to go ahead and play this arbitrary
waveform until a trigger is received. Then for my marker mode I'm going to set that
to be low at start. You'll see why when I load in my next waveform which is a faulty
sign wave. What makes this a faulty sign wave for dropout test is that it has a lower amplitude
than my standard trigger. Instead of manually changing the voltage settings on the standard
sine wave I'm using arb metadata to specify the amplitude. Arb metadata also contains
information for sample right and filter settings in case you want to change those as well.
For my play control this time I am going to repeat this one smaller segment three times
every time I press the trigger. I'm going to set my marker mode to be high at start.
This gives me a trigger that I can use on my oscilloscope when I'm testing multiple
pieces of equipment to allow me to see exactly when my faulty signal is coming in. So let's
download this to the instruments and I'm going to set my sample right to ten kilo samples
per second, just a nice round number. It will automatically go down to the instrument with
my settings for high level, low level and my filtering. If I go to the Waveform generator
I can see that I've got it set up. I'm going to press the local button and every
time I press my trigger key I'm going to get a few short cycles on the oscilloscope.
So press the trigger and a few short cycles. I can do that again so we can see that.
Now if I want to make a change I can go back over to my computer and instead of saying
repeat for three cycles I can actually select repeat until I receive another trigger on
the instrument. This basically creates a situation where every time I press the trigger key I
toggle between my normal sign wave and my dropout or my shorter amplitude sine wave.
So again, I'm going to send this data down to the instrument. Here we go. I have my normal
sine wave on the oscilloscope. When I press my trigger button I get my shorter sine wave
and when I press it again I go back to my original waveform. So now I can control exactly
when I get my dropout signal and I can see how my device under test behaves.
Now I want to do even more with my waveform. Instead of having just a drop out signal I
actually want to add some noise to my signal. I'm going to select the entire waveform
cycle and I am going to perform some waveform math under the edit menu. I'm going to select
noise as being a standard waveform with just a little bit of amplitude. I don't want
it to be a big part of my signal. So I'm going to select 0.2 volts peak to peak and
press okay. I get a preview of my waveform. When I select okay it will go ahead and add
it to the entire waveform.
Once I get my waveform with the noise added in all I have to do is download the new sequence
to the instrument. I can use these same techniques to re-order waveforms that I already have,
change the triggering or even add new sequences or new steps to my sequence. With the deep
memory up to 64 mega samples you can create really complex sequences with up to 512 segments.
Now that the waveform is downloaded to my instrument I can go ahead and press my trigger
key to get my noisy waveform. When I'm ready for my clean waveform just press my trigger
key again. So it's very efficient for me to go back and forth between a noisy signal
and a very clean signal on demand.
Using these techniques you can save time and memory by using Trueform Waveform Generators
to sequence smaller waveform segments to create a whole new signal rather than starting from
scratch. I hope this helps you out. Thank you for watching.