Power electronic devices are proliferating, finding use in applications ranging from PV and wind farms to high-brightness, efficient lighting. To make sure these devices will perform efficiently and reliably, designers and applications engineers will need ways to accurately characterize and test them all the way from the wafer level through the circuit-board (Figure 1) and subsystem level to final product. Bill Gatheridge, product manager at Yokogawa, summarized the classes of instruments his company makes for power test. Power analyzers, he said, can perform power-input/output efficiency tests during validation and characterization stages to meet Energy Star requirements, for example. "Digital oscilloscopes are used throughout the design and development process," he added. "They also are very useful in the circuit debug operations." Further, he said, "Function generators can be used to generate basic and application-specific arbitrary waveforms for circuit testing during the design and development process. During the debug operation, the function generator can be used to create noise that is applied to the device being designed or tested."
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