Smart Tweezers LCR-meter Gets Developmental Help from Russian Academy of Sciences

Oct. 5, 2012 - PRLog -- Siborg Systems Inc., based in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, and the Institute of Automation and Electrometry of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Novosibirsk, Russia have come together to develop a new model of the popular, handheld, LCR-meter.

Smart Tweezers are a world-renown, industry proven LCR-meter that solves the problems of testing and troubleshooting small electronic components.

The leading method for electronic manufacturing is Surface Mount Technology (SMT) where the tiny components,known as Surface Mount Devices (SMD), are mounted directly onto a printed circuit board (PCB). The small components may or may not have wire leads, and are very difficult to label due to size, leading to lost components and lost values.

Smart Tweezers are a simple solution to these problems. Easily held and operated with one hand, the device is able to evaluate all types of passive and through-hole devices, including Resistors, Capacitors and Inductors.

Widely recognized as a professional quality LCR-meter, Smart Tweezers can automatically determine the type of component (resistor, inductor, capacitor) and selects proper range and signal frequency for the highest accuracy measurement results. With a small LCD display mounted into the device, the test results, component type, and test conditions are relayed to the user.

"The main advantage of Smart Tweezers is a quick and highly accurate evaluation of SMT components as small as 0.3 mm," says R&D Director at Siborg Systems Inc., Michael Obrecht. "This accuracy level of about 0.2% is only available from expensive bench-type LCR-meters that require significant efforts in setting-up the measurements."

"From the very beginning, Smart Tweezers use sinusoidal test signal to evaluate impedance of the measured component. This involves a test signal generation that employs a Pulse Modulated Width (PMW) and high order filters that ensure a proper accuracy of the generated test signal entailing significant cost of the required components and PCB complexity leading to a relatively high manufacturing cost of the device."

"During one of the many exhibits that we attend every year, I met Valentin Litvintsev, an expect in analog circuit design who suggested a new way of creating a test signal for LCR-meters that would require significantly fewer number of components thus reducing the manufacturing cost."

"I liked the device (Smart Tweezers) from the very first glance. It is a very good product that is useful in many electronic applications. The only disadvantage it has is a relatively high price. I think we can manufacture a similar type of device with a bit lower accuracy but more affordable." says Valentin Litvintsev, Team Lead at the Institute of Automation and Electrometry of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Novosibirsk.

About Siborg Systems Inc:
Established in 1994, Siborg Systems Inc. is a source of engineering software and hardware tools for semiconductor and electronics industry. Located in the city of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, it enjoys being part of the local world-renowned high-tech community.

About Institute of Automation and Electrometry:
The Institute was founded in 1957 among the first institutions of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Research directions of the Institute comprise optics and laser physics, including physical processes in gaseous and condensed media induced by a radiation, nonlinear phenomena at the interaction of the radiation with structured materials; fundamental as well as applied research and development in the field of laser and optical technologies; architecture, system solutions, mathematical models and software for data processing and computing systems of recognition, analysis and representation of information and control systems for complex dynamic processes.
The Institute is the publisher of “Avtometriya”, which is published in English in the U.S.A. under the name of "Optoelectronics, Instrumentation and Data Processing".

Contact:
Academician Koptug ave. 1, Novosibirsk, Russia, 630090
Tel.: +7 (383) 330-1239
Fax: +7 (383) 333-38-63