The circuit in Figure 1 seems utterly simple but demonstrates unusual behavior. It produces an almost square wave of odd-integer quartz harmonics, including its main frequency. Figure 1. A simple circuit that produces an almost square wave ...
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 ...
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 ...
Many engineers and designers are unaware of the advantages of using brushed DC motors as generators. Design engineers know that both brush DC and brushless DC (BLDC) motors can operate as generators, but many tend to avoid running brushed DC motors ...
A spectrally pure sine wave oscillator is required for data converter; filter and audio testing. Figure 1 provides a stable frequency output with extremely low distortion. This quartz stabilized 4 kHz oscillator has less than 9 ppm (0.0009%) ...
Digital potentiometers (digiPOTs) are versatile and can be used in a wide variety of applications, for example, for filtering or generating ac signals. However, sometimes the frequency must be able to be varied and adapted to the desired ...
Since its invention over a half-century ago by Hanz Camenzind at Signetics, the familiar 555 analog timer (in league with its updated pin-compatible CMOS descendants) has become an iconic design element incorporated into useful standardized ...
More than a half-century old, the ubiquitous and mind-bogglingly useful 555 analog timer has become a perennial object for both kudus and criticism. Most of the former and some of the latter is justified, but sometimes a supposed shortcoming will ...
Many applications call for wide-range-tunable LC oscillators that can deliver a nearly constant-frequency, nearly harmonic-free output even when the circuit's output load changes. From a design viewpoint, eliminating either inductive or ...
A free-running generator built on the standard configuration of the 555 timer can't provide a duty cycle of exactly 50%. That's a well-known fact. Fortunately, there are several ways to get around this problem. The best is to place an extra ...