Created electronics and software for extremely low current, multi-channel measurement in an isolated environment.

Context

Our customer’s research group came up with a novel method of inspection. They needed a prototype system to prove out their ideas.

Solution

We met with our customer’s physicists to discuss the requirements of this research system. The sensor portion of this inspection device was required to reside at a potential of several thousand volts in a vacuum. This, long with the requirement to measure extremely low current values on over 200 channels created a very difficult set of requirements to satisfy.

Not only did these measurements need to be done but the data also needed to be transferred via Ethernet to a system for analysis. Because very few of these devices were to be built, we purchased a DSP based processing board to handle the data acquisition and transfer via Ethernet. This reduced the cost of the development of these prototype systems.

This off the shelf board was mounted on custom electronics that provided fiber optic isolation from the sensor measurement electronics. Our engineers found an integrated circuit that would allow us to make very precise measurements on over 200 channels. This design required a great deal of care because any noise (from the environment or even thermal noise of components) would affect the measurements.