Shock testing for the 21st Century


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G. Mark Remelman - 2025

In the late 80’s and Early 90’s shock (high speed transient testing) systems were limited to wiring multiple discrete subsystems together to make a data system. You had card / board level signal conditioners, digitizers, controllers and often separate memory. It was up to the integrator to come up with a system specification and some means of validating these specs. The late 90’s and early 2000’s saw the inclusion of DSP chips and over-sampling ADC’s (Sigma Delta Converters) added to these configurations, but now the discrete building blocks could be condensed into a single board or box package. By combining the discrete functions into one package and using DSPs to do the housekeeping it became possible to produce high reliability high accuracy data acquisition systems. These systems have end-to-end specifications which simplifies the task of evaluating their performance. The key is to understand what these specs mean and how do they help you take good data. This paper will help take some of the mystery out of choosing what is right for your application.