Data Acquisition using keithley 2450 and 2461 for making I-V measurement

[Abdou]

Dear all,

 

I am facing a problem of triggering both instruments keithley 2450 (for gate control) and 2461 (for pulsed Vds and drain current measurement).

I used state machine approch to setup parameters and making voltage sweeps.

Now, the problem is to synchronize triggers between instruments.

Could someone here in the forum help me with this problem or give me an idea how to do it ?

 

Thank you in advance.

FET I-V Tracer_Keithley 2450 and 2461.vi

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

Crosspost from here: https://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW/Data-Acquisition-using-keithley-2450-and-2461-for-making-I-V/m-p/4466369#M1319628

[ShaunR]

Triggers fall into two categories: software and hardware. Whether you use software or hardware depends on the trigger accuracy required-hardware being the most accurate. For your use-case I would highly recommend hardware triggering and I think those devices support two types: Digital IO and TSP-Link. Both are well documented in the manuals and I would further recommend digital IO as it is the simplest to configure.

The way to do this is first to get it all working through the devices' front panels. Connect them up (including the digital IO, configure using the menu's then run a test. That will tell you what commands (and in what order) you need to configure for a successful test as SCPI commands map directly to menu's for most manufacturers. The advantage here is that if your software fails for whatever reason, you can still run tests with a precision digit (a.k.a finger). Once you are getting good results then it will be just the case of sending a single command to trigger the tests and the devices will do the rest. After they have finished you can then read all the data out.