Joseph Wu (electrical engineer)

Joseph Wu is the named author of Texas Instruments' 2018 guide to resistance thermometer measurements, revised in 2023. The guide connects sensor wiring, excitation electric current, reference resistors and analog-to-digital converters rather than treating the converter as a complete thermometer by itself.^[ref]

One concrete design distinction is between two-wire resistance measurement and four-terminal sensing. In the two-wire arrangement, the same leads carry excitation electric current and contribute to the measured electric potential difference. Their electrical resistance is therefore counted with the sensor. Separate sense leads with high input impedance can exclude that series drop, although input leakage and other nonidealities still require attention.^[ref]

For an original ideal example, let a sensor have electrical resistance $R_T=100\Omega$, with two $1\Omega$ leads carrying $I=1\mathrm{mA}$. Two-wire resistance measurement givesThe $2\Omega$ lead error remains even when a shared reference resistor cancels excitation variations in the ratiometric measurement. Ideal four-terminal sensing instead measures $I{R}_T=100\mathrm{mV}$ directly across the sensor. This illustrates the platinum resistance thermometer lead resistance error mechanism without assuming a particular resistance-to-temperature calibration.

A proposed bench comparison replaces the sensor with a stable calibrated resistor and adds known series resistors to its current leads. Comparing two-wire and four-terminal sensing readings then tests lead-drop rejection without changing sensor temperature. The calculation distinguishes the wiring error from sensor self-heating in a ratiometric resistance measurement, which changes the sensor's actual electrical resistance.