Measurement and Instrumentation

This course offers a broad introduction to measurement and instrumentation systems. The basic elements of such systems will be presented: transducers, amplifiers, filters and analog-to-digital converters. The different sources of error (noise, interference, offset, non-linearity, aliasing) that limit the performance of such systems will be discussed. Methods of analytically determining the corresponding detection limits will be presented, and in particular how errors can be referred to the input of a system and represented by equivalent voltage/current sources.

Several techniques for mitigating measurement errors will be discussed in detail e.g. the use of feedback, filtering, synchronous modulation, chopping, auto-zeroing, dynamic element matching.

The course will conclude with a measurement laboratory. Students may choose ONE of the following topics: Device characterization, RF measurements or LF measurements.