EEVblog #757 - HP4263A LCR Meter Teardown

hi welcome to teardown Tuesday it's another eBay score that I've got this is a HP yes none of this agent or keysight rubbish 42 63 a LCR meter and it's an oldie but a goodie dates from about 1990 or thereabout so jeez it's amazing to think 1990 is like 25 years old but anyway it's an oldie a bit of goody bench LCR meter and I rather like these things the user interface is a little bit clunky as we will see later but I like the fact that they're nice and small and compact it is not as wide as a big you know 19-inch rack mount unit it's not that deep it only weighs out 4.4 kilos so it's relatively cheap to get one of these shipped and I picked up this for I saw it on there for 200 us buy it now and I offered lower than that and it was accepted and postage was reasonable and so it came in pretty good so for a it's a point one percent class LCR meter I can do more than LCN are kind of like measure transformer parameters open short compensation do all sorts of fantastic stuff so I thought we'd take a look inside I don't think I've ever taken the hood off one of these puppies before so let's check it out now don't confuse this with the 4260 3b model this is the IE model which is the older one with the single line LCD if you can pick up the newer B model for a decent price even better but I think they go for a lot more cuz they're you know they were keysight sorry agilent bloody branded and they went for a lot longer this one was discontinued I'm not actually sure let's have a look but yeah they're basically equivalent the B has a new dual line LCD a bit of dust inside this puppy which is quite unusual because these things don't have a fan another thing I like about them they're completely passive look at that a nice linear transform in the thing and beautiful let's check it out and wouldn't you know it I'm out of air duster spray to clean this thing up damn it so sorry you get the you get the grotty unit so yeah rather surprised at the amount of dust in here there's a noce fan in it so you know how does it I mean it's got vent holes maybe it was sitting in Iraq something like that and yeah you can get that rack extensions for these that plug in the side so you can plug them into 19-inch racks and maybe it was getting air flow from the rest of the system or something like that coming through the vent holes on the side over here anyway um it looks very neat and tidy I like it as I said we've got a big thumping that linear transformer here we've got interestingly there's our diode bridge okay but we've got this little hybrid board with surface mount on the bottom and - probably linear regulators on the top there with little pissant heat sinks on them so that's rather rather interesting got a big big bridge rectifier there and we're our two big cut filter caps they're Nippon chemi cons no worries whatsoever 105 degrees C rate and thank you very much and there's our our front panel terminals they got little common-mode toroids on them just to keep the crap out and nice board to board B and C's for those very nice one looks like we've got some input protection with the diodes there and because these things you don't want to go apply in DC voltage and it probably tells you that there it is discharged test device before connecting if you hook up a big thump and electrolytic capacitor charged up to it or I can ruin your day interestingly they've got a DC to DC converter in here they've got all the trouble for this nice linear power supply arrangement then they've got this little DC to DC converter brick and that's powering something over here so I'm not sure oh yeah in downing this I'm not sure what the deal is there hmm this top board here obviously the processor interface this puppy looks interesting are this dusters horrible take a good look at that in a minute it's the GPIB it's driving the GPIB so that would be our GPIB chipset up there and that's probably our process we'll take a look at that and there's the money shot for you 68,000 fanboys obviously the main processor there and it's the HC version awesome and we got ourselves an NEC Super Cup point 2 2 farad's there five point five volts no rechargeable or our primary lithium battery to leak in this thing by the looks of it excellent I love super caps and none of this modern flash rubbish we go on old schools I call x28 c64 a squared prom so that I hold all your non-volatile settings and then we've got ourselves a AMD EEPROM here for the main program 1 Meg it's a decent size eeep ROM let me tell you and there we go 1992 vintage but the main processor here is 50 second week 94 so this thing was built in 1995 and check this out very interesting package look at this I've rarely seen something like that it's obviously some sort of art national semiconductor custom ASIC or a gate array or something like that so if anyone's got any info on that please leave it in the comments of that is fascinating and of course it's all tied in to the process you can see all the traces and everything else so Wow some sort of it's almost like some sort of system glue logic you know tying that look it's tied up here maybe into maybe it's do some it's doing some memory as well and things like that so so it's almost like some sort of you know glue logic that you could have done in as you know a CP or D or a little FPGA or something but yeah so that makes me suspect that's some sort of custom gate array from National semiconductor and it wouldn't surprise me in the least if they upgraded this when they went to the B model with the dual line display because this thing probably went obsolete by you know like the end of the 90s I'll show you the rear panel as well mains selection here so you know no worries with buying these internationally at all and we've got external DC bias voltage external trigger the handle in handler interface these things are important because LCR meters like this are designed for like you know automated system production testing and stuff like that so you'd have this digital handle er interface which can control you know limit switches and you know all sorts of a bed of nails type stuff for your product under test and all controlled via our GPIB of course and made in Japan all the best stuffs made in Japan and for those wondering why it's made in Japan because that's a bit unusual for HP gear isn't it well not so much because this explains everything why HP Yokogawa HP it's this is actually our design and probably manufactured by Yokogawa for HP they had a partnership for lots of high-end test instruments and things like that serious dust under here that's for sure I really need to clean this sucker out I might have to head to JK and get an emergency can of compressed air to clean this out anyway interesting we've got ourselves a little lie shield there that's trying to do some RF shielding for this vertical board here which by the looks of the big capacitors on there and the resistors and there's some surface mount stuff on the other side i reckon that is the device under test range resistor select board because if you don't know how these LCR meters work well i've done a video on that way back in the day which o link in here check it out if you haven't seen it and the way these things work is that they put a resistor in series with the device under test and that's there range resistant which we'll see later we can actually select that on the front panel and with that resistor in series of course you measure you can measure the voltage and the current and hence the current going through the resistor and you can also measure the voltage of the device under test and from those from the voltage and current through the device under test and the phase you can actually calculate every parameter of the device under test inductance capacitance reactant series resistance and dissipation factor quality factor you name it you can calculate all this stuff and in the video here I've gone through and showed you the formulas that actually makes that happen now unfortunately I can't bend that board back because I'll break it but aha look at all these precision e looking resistors on here plus a couple of little liars Oh chips which are probably maxes to choose the range on there so yeah I reckon that's got to be the range resistor select board now I couldn't find a service manual for this forty to sixty three AE model but I did find the service manual for the B model which by the way looks like it came out in about two thousand so about ten years after they originally did the a model and by the way looking at the block diagram it looks like it may sort of have the main chip over here but like a similar layout but it could have changed anyway we have the overall theory of operation and it's exactly as I explained before I've showed it in the other video but yeah we've got a the device under test and a range resistor and it just measures the voltage and the currents going through the device and from that voltage current ratio measurement principle you get the impedance and from that there we go it only focuses on the impedance the other parameters LCR and every quality factor participation everything else is derived mathematically from the measured impedance values so it's rather quite simple we've got a signal source here selectable test frequency hundred Hertz 121 k10 k and hundred k in this case we've got our device under test so they're measuring the differential voltage across that here and then they're measuring the current through the device with a range resistor here which they can select in it's anywhere from like 1 ohm up to 10 Meg or something like that as we'll see later in the software and they just feed that multiplex that into an ADC and Bob's your uncle you can calculate anything very simple technique but there's a bit of math and filner in everything else which goes behind it and here is more of the practical implementation how they do it here we've got the four terminals on the front here so they do why Kelvin connection right at the device under test for compensate for you Tesla's we've got our signal source here which generates from our current terminal and then we can read that off and then they can just multiplex that and whack it into an ADC and there's your range resistor on the low inside there to easy and we've got ourselves a che Ches I if I'm pronouncing that correctly I'm sure I'm not once again Jeff in Japan because it's a Yokogawa product so you know no surprises for guessing that they're using Japanese chips in it it's rather obscure a k' 92018 - a vp can't really find a datasheet for it it's you know you get all the false leads on the on the merchants websites and stuff like that but of course based on you know it's an analogue part because IE you've got these electrolytic caps around it there's no like big digital stuff going into it and look they've got some resistors around here and it just looks like an analogue and log e type chip and what's it going to be in this thing well we need that analog to digital converter don't we so I'm pretty darn sure that is our analog to digital converter so I'm not sure what type it is it's probably some sort of you know maybe a dual slope converter or something not entirely sure but anyway definitely analog to digital converter and we've got ourselves a rather crude duck in here as well the Oh 802 and that is for setting your output signal level because today here's your output block diagram we have our reference oscillator here that's our DAC there that we just saw that we've got ourselves a low-pass filter and then the DC bias our source you can turn that off they just some that in and as we saw before you got an external connector on the back if you want to feed in your own DC bias and a buffer and then the source resistor that's not to be confused with the range resistor so that's the source resistor driving your device under test because as you can see not only can you set the frequency here from 100 Hertz up to 100 K but you can also set the voltage level as well and for voltage dependent devices that can be a big deal so you know this has that fixed steps built-in or you can actually feed in your own externally got ourselves an inter cell while 82 c-54 there that's a programmable timer counter chip and that puppy next door is just a very small lower pal there so this just got some glue logic associated with that timer counter I'm not sure why they bothered because the borders you know chock-a-block with all this other discrete logic stuff and down on the front end here no surprises for finding precision op amps in this case beurre Brown there though all the Ducks guts back in the day I'm OPI six to seven there are precision dye FET hard on this buy fit rubbish die fat op amps oh my god ourselves another regulator board down in there by the looks of it but yeah it is actually a different SMD layout on the back to this one we saw over here so I'm not sure what the deal is there now I'm actually doubting that it's a regulator board I think it could be something else actually if you give it a moment's thought you can probably figure out what this board does their power transistors and I'll tell you why well got ourselves the DAC here right that DAC as we saw on the modular block diagram the DAC of course drives the signal level we've got some filtering around here probably and then we've got the output buffer which has to drive today this wire here which is our positive high current output there there it is so that is obviously our output driver board with a couple of power transistors on there so some things like that actually become very obvious when you just you know follow the path and just put on your thinking cap for few seconds and try and figure it out so yeah I'd bet my bottom dollar that's a buffer amplifier board and as I said I'm willing to bet that's our range resistor board there or what they call the transducer there so I reckon that's probably if they're doing some maxing in there and of course would contain the range resistors it's just curiously placed because it's on the system diagram of course it's on the low side so here's our low side over here and well it's going in over here so hmm a few doubts but it just seems to match just like the physical you know physical arrangement of what's on there and stuff like that but interesting um so yeah we do not have the schematics for this thing that I could immediately find but if you do have them please link them in and then I will put always always put the link in down the bottom for those who want to play along at home with the service manual always fun and on the mains side of things here it's all very neat and tidy it's got the requisite input protection and all the jazz I like it apart from the fact that what wouldn't cut the mustard these days all the exposed mains wiring on the back of the voltage selection switch down in there so yeah that's not too great but still very neat and tidy so that's a look inside so I might now just pair it up and have a little play around with it now the 42 63 be service manual that I got sadly it doesn't have any schematics in it it's got the block diagrams the area of operation parts list all that sort of jazz but as he is quite common yet no schematic she only got that in like June like the printed out version possibly and nobody's scanned it in so let's power this puppy up and it wasn't like it was just sold as kind of like as is so I like the 14 segment display on these things fantastic there we go 42 63 I Oh what what was that hang on let's put it up yeah they got the 14 segment starburst display and Rev 2.00 option double o1 a short option double O one is at my be like external DC bias or something like that which in a lot of our gear like this you might pay extra for especially in like the old fluke Phillips LCR meters I think the DC bias was like an optional extra now the only issue with this thing it seems to be you know seems to be doing the business of course we're going to get overflow and you know every thing else because we've got nothing hooked up to all the sensors not hooked up so basically what we do these are the current drive lines which actually drive the current through the device and then of course you've got your sense terminal so it's a four terminal Kelvin measurement system now of course you can get really expensive um add-on pods which actually plug directly onto the front and then they've got the traditional two terminals for your device under test I don't have one of those I might actually make one up but in the meantime I've just made up a nice little adapter with four B and C's and I've just got the sense terminal joined inside there so now we can just measure two terminal devices easy and as you can see the B and C's are a bit crusty on this thing could actually replace them we could try and clean them up I might do that later but yeah they haven't they have seen better days but the actual internal contact is still okay so here we go we're just measuring a point one mic cap here in series mode and here's the thing I don't like about this series of LCR meters is that the user interface is a yeah it's a bit Dicky it's a bit difficult to use it's not the easiest thing to drive you really have to get used to it but anyway we've got all the different measurement parameters and the way you do it is a bit weird you go into measurement parameters and you think that you'd be able to select those with you up down arrows but that actually changes your main meant like your main menu options see six of eight here so on the first we can measure impedance so Zed is impedance so you can get impedance and that is like phase angle so if we actually chose that we could actually measure the impedance of our copper plus the phase angle so we would actually go in there and you see it's change from serious capacitance to displaying the impedance at that particular frequency we've got a hundred Hertz we can just choose the different frequencies we want here so let's just leave it at 100 Hertz and our drive level 50 millivolts that's going to be fine that's not going to the signal the the voltage dependency of this cap is not going to be it's not gonna matter much if at all no it's changing bugger-all there at 1 volts there we go it's changed a little bit down there but we'll just leave it on 50 millivolts and of course you can see that we've got negative 90 degrees there because it's almost an ideal capacitor well it's not a bad cap it's doing all right minus 90 degrees as your basic theory would suggest and of course if we put an inductor in there today the voltage is going to lead instead of lag a lot like we got on the capacitor yeah just like the theory it works so yes rather unusual interface they go your measurement parameter like this and then we can and of course we can get the resistance as well and then for all you admittance fanboys out there yes you can measure the admittance with your phase angle and then you can measure your conductance with your susceptance and then you've got your parallel capacitance with your dissipation factor as your secondary measurement so basically what we're seeing is primary measurement secondary display and then you can get your parallel capacitance with your quality factor if you want or whatever and then you can get serious capacitance just like it we'll see in a minute on the Agilent handheld meter and once again so series parallel with quality or dissipation factor and then inductance parallel of course with our quality or dissipation factor and then series inductance and then we can get with the DC resistance as well and then we can get into transformer type stuff and the impedance as we saw lots of measurement functions on this thing it's you're really quite nice so there we go if we measure the series capacitance of that very small dissipation factor 1/2 Abi's dick there or well I don't know all B's dicks is it and we can set like we can do averages and things like that that is actually 10 averages at the moment this is actually a very fast a very fast mediation like the update speed is actually quite quick because it's a system meter so it's designed for quick production measurement and things like that and then you've got a comparative stuff we can you can set up so you know component been in and things like that and you've got your buyers set up you can do a reference offset if you want so like a delta you can yeah there it is they've got like a dildo reference and you can actually choose which parameter you want a delta so you can choose that CS so we can actually dealt her out that one that we just did so it's a rather convoluted system to actually do this but we can go in there and then we can go on up no my gifted did I yep screwed the pooch it's a really annoying user interface you've got you know like if you don't use it for a while you will certainly forget how to use the damn thing so let's see if I got it this time reference and go in there and then we can choose there we go from off Delta so we're going to press mode again to go over to Delta and then we press ENTER and tada there we go we've now got Delta series capacitance so actually why I didn't cancel that out and is now showing 0 I'm not sure it should have hmm so it looks like it can't take the delta from the component under test or maybe it can but anyway in this case it looks like I've got to actually daughter out let's say we can Delta route 10 in there so let's do that and no doesn't like that at all oops anyway these I think you'd get the idea these things are a pain in the ass to drive if you have an RTF m'd okay so we're getting a hundred point two six nano farad's at 100 Hertz so let's try that on our handheld meter there we go that's not too shabby 100 point 2 2 here once again we're in series mode they're at a hundred Hertz so all the same measurement parameters the the actual signal test level isn't going to really make a difference here so there we go it's pretty done close to spot-on this is a is this is one of the best handheld LCR meters you can get in my opinion the you 17:33 see it's a bit pricey I know you can get like those cheap ones on eBay for like you know 80 bucks these days and they're pretty good but yeah if you can afford it this one's a pretty decent meter but this one as I said like 0.1% class instrument and they're actually the the accuracy specs of these are actually quite complicated it's it's not just you know a simple point one percent they got like a whole chart and everything for it but as you can see it's some pretty much bang on after 20 years awesome and you can set up other things like our cable compensation you can do open short I don't think don't know if this does open short load compensation I think the B model does aren't going to what those is I might have done that in a previous video but yeah you know and you can set up triggering all that sort of stuff for all the automated handling interface as we saw on the back and you can do all sorts of weird and wonderful things there's lots of stuff in there that I haven't in the setup which I haven't actually shown so but it's a very powerful versatile bench LCR meter so there you go that's the HP 40 to 60 3i and I think it still pretty much holds its own today you know point one percent class with all the capability yeah the user interface is a little bit annoying but you know if you can pick up one of these like I did for under two hundred US bucks and I think you know that's pretty much a bargain especially if you can get the newer B model it's just got the nicer dual line matrix screen and things like that but I believe it's almost identical functionality but even for a 20 year old instrument it's really quite nice and I like the form factor too it's you it doesn't take up a huge amount of space on your bench it might be a bit bigger than some modern LCR metres might be a bit deeper or something like that but you know I think it does pretty well it's a nice compact instrument and check them out on eBay if you can score one so there you go there's another quick teardown of another eBay score hope you liked it if you did please give it a big thumbs up and as always I'll link to data sheets and things down below and forum comments catch you next time you

Channel: EEVblog

Views: 56,794

Rating: 4.9529066 out of 5

Keywords: hewlett packard, agilent, keysight, hp4263a, 4263b, ebay, teardown, pcb, schematic, lcr meter, voltage, current, resistance, capacitance, inductance, series, parallel, measurement, test, leads, manual, tutorial, math, how to

Id: 73AWJSugx3o

Length: 27min 25sec (1645 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 23 2015