Engineers may have captured a distorted voltage waveform at a particular location because it causes their device under test (DUT) to malfunction using a digital storage oscilloscope (DSO) with the intent to reproduce the voltage waveform in a laboratory environment for product improvement. The Chroma 61500 series or 61800 series programmable AC voltage supplies are capable of reproducing complex user defined AC voltage waveforms. A waveform cycle can be imported from a Microsoft® Office Excel file with 1024 sample points. Up to six user defined waveforms can be stored at a time on the Chroma source.

A modern DSO is capable of sampling data in the GS/s range. However, such sampling rates are not necessary to adequately capture and reproduce a voltage waveforms commonly occurring in the 50/60 Hz electrical power grid. When oversampled data is recorded it must be decimated by sampling every nth point of the acquired data in order to be in the required 1024 sample point format.

This AppNote describes how to perform the necessary operations to upload a waveform to the Chroma 61500 or 61800 instruments.