New Industry Products

Event Trigger option for Power Analyzers

January 21, 2016 by Jeff Shepard

Steady-state measurements are making up a considerable portion of power analyzers' everyday use scenarios. Still, it is often the unpredictable events that give design engineers a headache. Reliable detection of transient conditions imposes heavy demands on the instruments used. Whenever supreme accuracy, low measurement ranges, direct current measurement and robust electrical isolation are required, oscilloscopes and transient recorders have to cede to power analyzers.

The LMG600 series power analyzers from ZES ZIMMER Electronic Systems GmbH can be equipped with the Event Trigger software option (L6-OPT-EVT) to monitor voltage and current signals for unique conditions. Those conditions can be characterized by upper and lower bounds of the sample values, which can also be combined to define signal windows for triggering. After trigger conditions have been set, ZES ZIMMER’s TriggerView offers a convenient way to verify the correctness of the settings. TriggerView visualizes the effects of settings like sync filters and level or hysteresis and displays the resulting trigger signal.

Once the defined conditions are violated for the minimum duration chosen by the customer, recording is activated. The length of the recording can be chosen by the user, with 16 tracks at 4M each available for storage. The recorded samples are available graphically on the LMG600’s scope in a separate tab, or numerically via the data interfaces for further analysis. Using the event trigger function has no impact on cycle based power measurements carried out in parallel on the same channel.