MEASURING SUB 1 PF CAPACITOR AND 10 NH INDUCTOR COMPONENTS USING TWEEZER METERS

Program Description :

Tweezer meters such as LCR-Reader and Smart Tweezers have been used for SMD component characterization for nearly two decades. The record holder in both accuracy and range is LCR-Reader which offers 0.1% basic accuracy and ranges from 5 mOhm to 20 MOhm, 0.1 pF to 1 F and inductance from 10 nH to 100H. We will be presenting an approach that allowed to significantly extend measurement range of any 2-wire measurement setup by an order of magnitude by extraction of the parasitic impedance of the measurement equipment. As it was published in IEEE Test and Measurement Magazine in August 2023 https://lcr-reader.com/documents/IAMM-2023.pdf, a simple parasitic offset extraction allowed to reliably measure sub 10 nH inductors using HP4284A LCR-meter and HP16034E test fixture. This offset is especially critical for tweezer meters which inherently have 0.5 parasitic capacitance and 10 nH inductance offset. We came up with a simple calibration tool that reduces the offset by and order of magnitude for tweezer meters using Open/Short calibration.