A new attenuation circuit for voltage signal conditioning in electronic measurement instrumentation

Voltage measurement instruments such as oscilloscopes or voltmeters require programmable attenuation circuits for adjusting the level of the input signal to the range of the analog to digital converters. Whereby data conversion and digital processing have experienced great advances in recent years, attenuation circuits maintain traditional topologies based on relays and little effort has been dedicated to their update. This paper proposes a new attenuation topology based on solid-state switches taking advantage of this technology and obtaining a low cost and good response circuit. A detailed study of the design, mathematical analysis and simulation results of the topology are included. Also a prototype with two attenuation scales and a normalized input impedance intended to work with measurement probes was developed and the practical results are also presented.