Articles and news - 6

Many power-supply designs rely on accurately sensing the voltage across a current-sense element...

In the classic configuration and most variants of the astable 555 multivibrator circuit, the timing characteristics are based on the charging and discharging of a capacitor. However, it can be argued that since the exponential voltage of a capacitor is qualitatively similar to inductor current...

In battery-powered applications in which power management is key, a microprocessor may adjust its core voltage corresponding to an increase or a decrease in clock speed, allowing full processing power when necessary but not wasting excess power when idle...

75 years ago, one of the biggest electronics firms of the century got its start in a Palo Alto, California, garage – and it did so with the help of Mickey Mouse...

A previous Design Idea “Gated 555 astable hits the ground running” offered a fix for the problem of the excessively long first pulse that’s generated by traditional topology 555 astable circuits on start up when gated by the RESET pin...

While refurbishing an ageing audio mixer, I decided that the level meters needed special attention...

The classic and versatile 555 finds its way into many low to moderate frequency oscillator applications. Some of these require the ability to selectively gate oscillation on and off on demand and the 555’s RESET pin...

This article describes a technique to compensate the DC voltage drift in the output of a directly-coupled AB-Class audio power amplifier...

Awhile back I published a simple design idea for a thermal airspeed sensor based on a self-heated Darlington transistor pair. In the circuit, Q1 plays the role of self-heated sensor. Its VBE tempco converts temperature into voltage which is then offset and scaled by A2 to a 5 V span...

A recent Design Idea presents a circuit to measure an airflow rate up to 2000 fpm using two transistors in a Darlington configuration. One transistor works as a self-heated thermal sensor and the other one compensates for ambient temperature variations. The circuit is smart and simple; however, the output voltage depends on the input flow rate in a very nonlinear fashion...