Articles - 7

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 ...

One of our technicians recently asked for help determining the value of an SMT inductor. It was unmarked, and was many turns of very fine wire on a ferrite core. The resistance measured 26 Ω, which for some reason gave our ancient LCR bridge ...

Boost converters, like other switchers, have traditionally received their control signals from a dedicated circuit. However, a recent trend is to integrate simple switching-power-supply building blocks into generic devices, such as ...

To test a gigabit-speed data-recovery chip, you need a clock with a controllable duty cycle. Because most pattern and clock generators have a fixed duty-cycle output of 50%, the design may require a small circuit to distort the duty cycle. The ...

These days, much of the news coverage and discussion in the semiconductor industry is about devices based on the new wide bandgap (WBG) materials such as silicon carbide (SiC) and gallium nitride (GaN) The medium-to-high power applications that ...

Here are some simple tips for servo systems that may improve productivity and prevent costly downtime. To help engineers and design teams get all the performance possible from servo systems, here are some of the more troublesome servo predicaments ...