The pypsucurvetrace curve tracer

pypsucurvetrace is a software toolbox for «curve tracing» of electronic components like transistors or vacuum tubes. It uses standard off-the-shelf programmable power supplies (PSUs) to apply predefined voltages to the device under test (DUT) and to determine the corresponding currents flowing through the DUT.

Curves Examples

pypsucurvetrace provides the following command-line tools:

  • curvetrace controls the PSUs, records the «curve data» of the DUT, and saves them to a data file. The curvetrace program can also control the DUT temperature during curve tracing using an optional heater block.

  • curveplot produces high-quality plots of the curve data.

  • curveprocess determines characteristic DUT parameters from the curve data (operating points, gain, output conductance).

  • curvematch calculates the «difference between two curve sets» to help finding parts with similar curves (part matching).

The pypsucurvetrace tools are written in Python 3 and will therefore work on all computers running a modern operating system.

Contents

Note

  • pypsucurvetrace is free software and uses the GPL-3 license (see LICENSE.txt or http://www.gnu.org/licenses).

  • Report issues and bugs here

  • Discussion thread about curve tracing with pypsucurvetrace.

  • The pypsucurvetrace code and this documentation are under construction, and are managed at GitHub.