Peter Khairolomour

In developing electronic systems, designers look for products or ideas that may benefit from the better performance, smaller size, lower cost, and improved reliability that an IC can offer. Toward that end, the digital potentiometer emerged as an alternative to its mechanical...

The circuit that's shown in Figure 1 implements a programmable 0- to 20-mA precision current source. The REF192 low-headroom 2.5-V voltage reference (U1) can source up to 30 mA. An AD5280 digital potentiometer (U2) controls the voltage-divider ratio of the reference...