TABLE OF CONTENTS Alan J.De Vilbiss
Agilent Technologies
Colorado Springs, Colorado
The word oscilloscope has evolved to describe any of a variety of electronic instruments used to observe, measure, or record transient physical phenomena and present the results in graphic form. Perhaps the popularity and usefulness of the oscilloscope spring from its exploitation of the relationship between vision and understanding. In any event, several generations of technical workers have found it to be an important tool in a wide variety of settings.
The prototypical oscilloscope produces a two-dimensional graph with the voltage presented at an input terminal plotted on the vertical axis and time plotted on the horizontal axis (Fig. 14.1). Usually the graph appears as an illuminated trace on the screen of a cathode-ray tube (CRT) and is used to construct a useful model or representation of how the instantaneous magnitude of some quantity varies during a particular time interval. The quantity measured is often a changing voltage in an electronic circuit. However, it could be something else, such as electric current, acceleration, light intensity, or any of many other possibilities, which has been changed into a voltage by a suitable transducer. The time interval over which the phenomenon is graphed may vary over many orders of magnitude, allowing measurements of events which proceed too quickly to be observed directly with the human senses. Instruments of current manufacture measure events occurring over intervals as short as tens of picoseconds (10 ?12 s) or up to tens of...
