Articles - 7

Many power-supply designs rely on accurately sensing the voltage across a current-sense element. Multiphase regulators use the sense voltage to force current sharing among phases, and single-phase regulators to control the current-limit setpoint. ...

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. In the 1930s and 40s, David Packard and fellow Stanford University graduate William ...

This article describes a technique to compensate the DC voltage drift in the output of a directly-coupled AB-Class audio power amplifier. The main benefit of a directly-coupled output is improved bass response. Since the design eliminates the ...

A recent Design Idea ( Ref. 1 ) 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 ...

Brushless DC (BLDC) motors transform electrical power into mechanical power. However, there’s no such thing as a perfect motor; there are always losses in the transformation. The three main types of losses created during the conversion are ...

It was a no brainer at first. Circa 1985 equipment still in use by telcos, the DUT was a remote-operated twisted-pair telephone cable analyzer. We had extensively reverse-engineered and repaired several of these a couple years ago, the OEM was ...

Digital gates are fundamentally analog in nature. They use transistors. Sure, these transistors are operated at their conduction extremes (which is why they are called “digital”), but during the logic state transition they're pure ...

While choosing an op-amp buffer for a new high-resolution single-supply DAC, a source of negative supply was considered because the buffer op-amp had to provide true zero voltage on its output. For instance, a typical rail-to-rail output op-amp ...

This article explains the basis for achieving an optimized board layout, a critical aspect in the design of switch-mode power supplies. A good layout ensures stable functioning of the switching regulator and minimizes radiated interference as well ...

A well known power supply circuit is the capacitance multiplier. It doesn’t regulate, but instead reduces ripple noise while the output tracks at some fraction of the input voltage (Figure 1). Figure 1. Standard “capacitance ...