Articles Analogue Design - 3

The design of a standard inverting integrator is simple when bipolar supplies are available, but it's cumbersome with a unipolar supply. To allow adequate headroom for the output, the circuit must be biased away from ground, often at half the ...

Known devices for taking the square root contain an operational amplifier and a multiplier connected in a feedback loop. The accuracy of these devices depends on the method of building the multiplier, with the most accurate using logarithm and ...

Every PWM DAC design needs analog filtering to separate the desired PWM duty-cycle-proportional DC component from unwanted AC ripple. The simplest of these is the basic RC low-pass filter, which gives a peak-to-peak ripple amplitude (for the worst ...

Although current mirrors and circuits such as the Howland current source are taught in analog circuit courses, a surprising number of engineers tend to think exclusively in terms of voltage when defining the output of precision analog circuitry. ...

While measuring op-amp input capacitance, what should you focus on? The answer is that you must ensure the measurement accuracy isn’t degraded by the stray capacitance and inductance of the PCB or test setup. You can minimize these issues by ...

In process-control applications requiring discontinuous controllers, the most elementary choice is a two-position-mode or on/off controller. A typical example of such a controller is a space heater. If the temperature drops below a setpoint, the ...

A switched-mode power supply (SMPS) employing peak current-mode control (PCMC) requires a ramp signal to slope-compensate the inner (current) control loop. Slope compensation stabilizes the current loop, which would otherwise exhibit subharmonic ...

ADCs with differential inputs are becoming increasingly popular. This popularity isn't surprising, because differential inputs in the ADC offer several advantages: good common-mode noise rejection, a doubling of the available dynamic range ...

The simple circuit shown accomplishes full-wave signal rectification with only one transistor (Fig. 1). This is done by exploiting the “gain reversal” phenomenon exhibited by a saturated bipolar transistor. This circuit will find ...

The human ear is very good at detecting noise or missing cycles in a waveform, and since we have two ears, we can monitor two signals at once. I recently repaired an older lab instrument containing a quadrature encoder made with an incandescent ...