AUTOMATED MEASUREMENT OF RESISTIVITY OF THIN FILMS -

Abstract

In the area of measurements, a big part of the technical expertise is gained from practical experience. Therefore, the learning period require to become a skilled engineer is usually very long. Nowadays, when more industries/companies go into the area of measurement by choosing hardware and software solutions instead old manual methods there is a rising need for more efficient measurement methods for engineers. The programming ease' and falling cost of PC make it very attractive to be used in automated measurements. The availability of high performance computing software can be used for data management, processing and presentation. Computer aided measurements needs interfacing hardware which has been presented in this dissertation. First, the subject of data acquisition has been structured into adequate work areas and the required human knowledge for engineers in the measurement area is classified and described. Each part of the hardware design including, unipolar and bipolar configuration of digital to analog converter for writing digital data, selecting channels and acquiring data using multiplexing, reading digital data and controlling parameters using analog to digital converter, generating clock signal have been explained. In a subject like measurement, which is strongly connected to practical knowledge, it is vital that presented theory is accompanied by practical related information thus finally required programs and graphs have been presented to support the proper working of interface using MATLAB and data acquisition toolbox. To facilitate the learning of component behaviors and circuit performance in this dissertation, there is a methodology presented how to develop comprehensible hardware for automated measurement and to facilitate the understanding of programming language, structured programs for data acquisition have been explained. This work may help engineers to fmd more structured ways of designing data acquisition hardware.