Using Electronic Measurement Equipment in Winter.

摘要

It is well known that heat is the enemy of electronic semiconductor devices because it causes high noise voltages and large leakage currents. But low temperatures can also present problems--for example, high junction voltages, loss of hermetic seals, and breaks in input/output lead wires. Today, electronic instrumentation and measurement equipment can be successfully operated in a winter field environment much more readily than 10 or even 5 years ago. Semiconductor devices like transistors, diodes, silicon control rectifiers (SCR's), and operational amplifiers will work at temperatures down to -40 C. With modern integrated circuit technology it is much easier to obtain excellent thermal performance from a circuit since the entire circuit is concentrated on a small chip, guaranteeing that all its components will have a uniform temperature. Better design strategies are constantly being developed to keep electronic devices well behaved over wide temperature ranges.