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You are here: Home » Blog » Measurement

Video: Using a Network Analyzer as a TDR

September 26, 2020 by Rolf Ostergaard

See how you can do fast TDR measurements using a network analyzer or VNA in this video. Whenever you are designing boards with specific characteristic impedances, you will want to be able to verify that on your fabricated boards. It’s recommended to put in test traces on each layer, but how do you measure this. Getting access to a good TDR may be difficult, as this is still a quite expensive piece of equipment.

How about using a low-end VNA instead? In this video, we set up the ZNL3 (up to 3GHz) VNA from Rhode & Schwarz to do this measurement to see how much time-domain resolution we get. Obviously the higher the frequency range, the more time/distance resolution you get. This is similar to how you get more resolution from a TDR with a shorter rise time.

Take a look and see the performance when using this ZNL3 network analyzer as a TDR on a simple trace impedance measurement.

(also available directly on YouTube)

The board used in the video is the test board we use for the signal integrity course at Danish Technical University (which btw just ranked 2nd in the world – not sure why, but I think it’s partly because of this course :).

The board used to demo how to use the network analyzer as a TDR

As you can see, by using a test trace of only a bit more than 10 cm you can actually get a decent TDR measurement of the trace impedance with this low-end VNA.

Compare this to the measurements done with a “real” much more expensive TDR some time back.

DISCLAIMER: R&S provided the ZNL3 on loan for EE-Training.

Filed Under: Measurement Tagged With: Network Analyzer, PDN, PI, Power Integrity, SA, TG, Video, VNA

About Rolf Ostergaard

Rolf V. Ostergaard, M.Sc.EE. has worked with signal integrity in many different projects since working for 3Com in 1998 as a colleague to Lee Ritchey in Silicon Valley. While building a consulting business focused on advanced electronics and embedded software in Denmark, Rolf has been helping numerous companies with signal integrity and power integrity both as design, simulations, coaching, measurements, and troubleshooting. He started conducting training in SI in 2004 and has trained hundreds of engineers, which lead to founding EE-Training to further expand this.
You can hire Rolf to do signal integrity training and consulting worldwide and remote.

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