Circuits & Schematics

Noise in electrical circuits is typically the enemy, and any self-respecting circuit should output as little noise as possible. Nevertheless, there are cases where a well-characterized source of noise with no other signal is entirely the desired ...

In the early days of personal computers, incorporation of one or two (or more) RS-232 serial ports as general purpose I/O adaptors was common practice. Recently, this “vintage” standard has been largely replaced (after all, it is 64 ...

A variety of analog front-end functions typically assist ADCs to do their jobs. These include instrumentation amplifiers (INA), digitally programmable gain (DPG), and sample and holds (S H). The circuit in Figure 1 is a bit atypical in merging all ...

An electronic dice is always an enjoyable project, which is easy to implement with some lines of program code on a microcontroller, or with a few digital components. However, implementing an electronic dice in analog technology is more of a ...

Piezoelectric actuators (benders, stacks, chips, etc.) are excellent fast and precise means for generation and control of micro, nano, and even atomic scale movement on millisecond and faster timescales. Unfortunately, they are also excellent ...

Using the system shown in Fig. 1, you can quickly test a cable containing twisted-wire pairs and detect open or reversed pairs, shorted pairs, and shorts between unrelated pairs. The tester consists of an active test set that plugs into one end of ...

Introduction Photovoltaic (PV) modules are popular and affordable sources of renewable energy. Most photovoltaic modules last about 20 years, but thermal stress and moisture ingress, among other causes, can degrade a module’s output power ...

In 1986, famed analog innovator Jim Williams, in “Designs for High Performance Voltage-to-Frequency Converters” ( Reference 1 ) published his 100 MHz “King Kong” VFC. If anyone’s ever done a faster VFC, I haven’t ...

Analog-to-digital conversion based on the classic combination of a voltage-to-frequency converter (VFC) with a counter has been around for (many) decades, mainly because it has some durable time-proven advantages. VFC digitization is naturally ...

Some applications, such as ADC testing and calibration, require a DAC with extremely good resolution, monotonicity, accuracy, and resolution. In these categories of performance, the circuit in Figure 1 is hard to beat. Its typical specifications ...