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Keysight Technologies
Evaluating Oscilloscope Mask Testing for
Six Sigma Quality Standards




Application Note
Introduction

Engineers use oscilloscopes to measure and evaluate a variety of signals from a range of sources.
Oscilloscopes play a major role in both design and manufacturing--presenting an engineer with a
visual display of voltage over time. It is crucial to have an oscilloscope that will not only provide
accurate visual representations of the signal, but will also provide usability and functions that makes
designing and testing signals easier.

Every manufacturer must address quality assurance (QA) to ensure products consistently meet
standards for design and performance and maintain a low defect rate. QA is a systematic approach to
designing and providing processes to ensure confidence in and sustainability of a product's quality.
As part of the QA process, you must test and verify product operation many times at each stage in
design and validation. For products that generate electronic signals such as integrated chips (ICs) and
field programmable logic arrays (FPGAs), you must verify that each signal operates within required
tolerances for signal integrity. These tolerances, measured with an oscilloscope, include various signal
attributes such as peak-to-peak voltage, frequency, RMS voltage, and delay.

The ideal QA process for products that use electronic signals would test signals for high quality
standards (low failure rates) utilizing a large number of samples, without impacting test times. Such
a QA process would yield three key benefits: 1) high quality products in less time, speeding up time
to market, 2) greater customer satisfaction, and 3) allow designers and engineers to spend more time
creating new designs rather than fixing old ones.

This application note discusses the statistical principles that apply to the QA process and the
evolution of Six Sigma efficiency