ABSTRACT
The measurement of devices was historically done with a bridge circuit that is an ac modification of the Wheatstone bridge. The method essentially involves manually finding a pair of values representing the capacitance and dissipation factor. This is done by adjusting calibrated resistors to balance a bridge circuit and observing a minimum voltage across the diagonal terminals of the bridge. Because this is a manual method it is slow and tedious, particularly because the two values are interacting, necessitating an adjustment of the first value after the minimum was found for the second value. It is therefore a slowly converging cyclic adjustment. Classical ac bridges are also limited to low frequencies (below approximately 1 MHz).
