DMM takes measurements you can touch and ‘feel’

The high-accuracy, 7½-digit DMM7510 is the first in a new class of metrological-quality instruments (yet with a price under $4k) that its manufacturer refers to as Graphical Sampling Multimeters (GSMs). The DMM/GSM integrates digital multimeter functionality with a digitizer for waveform capture, and provides a touchscreen interface with pan, pinch, and zoom functions and the ability to set cursors. The combination gives users a new level of interactivity with the signals they’re studying, yielding a greater “feel” for their measurements. The overall result is a deeper exploration of measurements, a more complete sense of their characteristics, and higher confidence in their accuracy.

For example, during characterization or debugging today, you often need to look at signal transitions that present a large jump in voltage or current, but you also need to see the small signal variations (over/undershoot) that can affect performance. For this case, the GSM offers flexible signal capture, with not only user-selectable 3½ to 7½-digit resolution and expanded measurement ranges (100mV, 1Ω, and 10µA) to enhance low-level accuracy, but also fast, high-accuracy signal sampling with an 18-bit digitizer running at rates to 1 Msample/s. The sampled data — up to 27.5 million measurements — can then be viewed on the touchscreen in multiple ways — as waveforms, histograms, or in tabular format — and analyzed without the need for any additional instruments.

In support of sampling comes enhanced touch-controllable analog triggering (edge, pulse, and window triggers) plus a built-in graphing utility to support display and comparison of measurements or waveforms from up to four reading buffers at once. Metrology-level performance characteristics include 14 ppm basic 1-year Vdc accuracy, autocalibration to minimize temperature and time drift, and low-burden voltage to improve low-current measurement accuracy. And there’s built-in support for low-resistance applications, including dry circuit, offset compensation, and open-lead detection.