Specifications

10
Experimentally, it has been established that the heating power of a waveform can be related to a DC
situation by the use of RMS measures. Thus, a 1 volt RMS periodic voltage that causes a 1 ampere
RMS current through a 1 Ω resistor has an average power dissipated in the resistor of 1 watt. Here,
"average" means that the instantaneous power values are averaged over one waveform period or
longer. The use of this relationship applies to any shape of waveform, not just sinusoidal
waveforms.
Non-sinusoidal waveforms
There are other often-encountered waveforms that have special names. The following figure shows
some examples:
Figure 4
a Square wave
b
Pulse waveform
(note the pulse's minimum values here are 0 volts and the peak voltage is 1 volt)
c Triangle wave
d Ramp wave (also called a sawtooth wave)
e Rectified sine wave (


sin()


)
f
Square root wave
(amplitude is proportional to the square root of the time from the start of the wave's period)
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