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Low Level Measurements Handbook

Low Level Measurements Handbook

Low Level Measurements Handbook

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FIGURE 2-5: Guarded ConfigurationConnecting CableR SV SHICableShieldR LGUARDR G I GV M+A GUARD–LOVoltage SourceVoltmeter with Guard Bufferalso reduced, making the response speed of the circuit much faster. This isdiscussed in detail in the paragraphs on Shunt Capacitance Loading andGuarding.The source-measure unit (SMU) can also be used to measure voltagesfrom a high resistance source and the Guard terminal will make a similarimprovement.The circuit of the electrometer when used as a voltmeter is actually asshown in Figure 2-6. The guard amplifier is a unity-gain amplifier with veryhigh input impedance. The open-loop gain, A GUARD , ranges from 10 4 to 10 6 .The leakage resistance (R L ) is multiplied by this gain and the measured voltagebecomes:A GUARD RV LM = V S –––––––––––––––––( RS + A GUARD R L)Example: Assume R S has a value of 10GΩ and R L is 100GΩ. If we assumea mid-range value of 10 5 for A GUARD and a value of 10V for V S , the voltagemeasured by the meter is:10V 16M = 10 ––––––––––––––––––V M = 9.99999V( 1.000001 × 1016 )Thus, we see the loading error with guarding is less than 0.001%. Incontrast, the unguarded error voltage with this combination of source andshunt resistances would be about 9%.Shunt Capacitance Loading and GuardingThe settling time of a voltage measurement depends both on the equivalentsource resistance and the effective capacitance at the input of the voltmeter;<strong>Measurements</strong> from High Resistance Sources 2-7

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