Agilent Getting the Calibration You Need - Application Note 5990-9720EN c20140725 [8] free download

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Keysight Technologies Getting The Calibration You Need If your organization is like most technology companies, test equipment is an important part of ensuring the quality and performance of your end products. One of the fundamental values of test equipment is the confidence you gain from the measurements-- and pass/fail decisions--they produce. The source of that confidence is the specified accuracy of each instrument, and the foundation of that accuracy is calibration. Ultimately, the bedrock beneath that foundation is the service provider you select to calibrate your instruments. Application Note A Practical Example The concept of getting the calibration you need has real-world implications. Recently, one of our customers shared its irst-hand experience with calibration providers. The company was using a variety of Keysight Technologies, Inc. equipment to verify speciic parameters and speciications in a range of end products. At the time, they were relying on a third-party provider that had been the lowest-cost bidder for calibration services. As a wave of instrument calibrations came due, the company asked Keysight to help interpret the trace reports that accompanied each instrument. Working with the customer's quality team, our specialists helped identify the speciic parameters that could actually be tested with the standards listed in the trace report. The result: Several key specs either couldn't be tested or weren't being tested. Consequently, the customer's technical staff performed additional audits that revealed more problems. In the aftermath, the customer switched to Keysight as its calibration provider. As the original equipment manufacturer, Keysight is able to test more parameters and more points, and perform adjustments that bring out-of- alignment instruments back into spec. As a result, the customer is now receiving calibration services that meet or exceed the level of quality it expects in its test systems and end products. A quick look at calibration Calibration is the process of measuring the actual performance of an instrument-under-test (IUT) using lab instruments that have significantly better performance than the IUT. The performance of every lab instrument must be traceable to International System (SI) units through a national metrology institute such as NIST, NPL or BIPM. Calibration involves more steps than you might imagine, and the overall process is diagrammed in Figure 1. Performance tests compare the instrument's actual performance to published (i.e., "data sheeted") specifications. In the ideal case, the service provider will test the performance corresponding to all data-sheeted specifications, for all installed options, every time. If the instrument passes all tests, the process is concl