The circuit in Figure 1 is a good choice if you need a power supply with high efficiency and you don't want to use expensive dc/dc-converter ICs. The heart of the circuit is IC 1 , the common, inexpensive LM7805 linear regulator. The external ...
A microcontroller requires dc operating power in the 2 to 5.5 V range, an amount that a battery or a secondary power source can easily supply. However, in certain situations, a microcontroller-based product must operate directly from a 120 or 220 ...
Art Hogrefe EDN A number of circuits, such as level detectors and AM demodulators, benefit from a rectifier with a low offset voltage. Silicon diodes have an offset of approximately 0.6 V and do not work well in low-level circuitry. A Schottky ...
Richard Dunipace EDN Low-cost DVM (digital-voltmeter) modules are economical and can significantly reduce design time for instrumentation. Yet, these modules also involve a significant number of design challenges. For example, their inputs are not ...
Carl Pugh EDN Most circuits use bypass capacitors and can deliver substandard performance if the capacitors have poor pulse characteristics. Few if any articles cover how to test bypass capacitors for pulse characteristics. The circuit in Figure 1 ...
You can assemble a pulse-generation circuit from a simple Schmitt-input AND gate plus a resistor-capacitor timing network. However, if you need a logic function that's not a standard catalog item, you need a Schmitt-input gate or inverter and ...
The white-LED flasher in Figure 1 offers an alternative approach to a previously published idea ( Reference 1 ). Targeting use in portable appliances and products powered by a single cell, this circuit flashes an LED to provide a highly visible ...
A Hunt EDN When I was recently debugging a design, I discovered that a short circuit existed from a ground plane to a power plane. I did not have access to a milliohmmeter or an equivalent tester for locating this type of short circuit. So, I ...
Vladimir Rentyuk EDN Most engineers know that they can use an inexpensive, three-terminal adjustable regulator, such as Fairchild Semiconductor’s LM317 , as an adjustable regulator to only some necessary value of voltage, such as 36 or 3 V. ...
Application Note AN-4155 March 2013 Fairchild recently developed a field-stop, shorted-anode, insulated-gate, bipolar transistor (IGBT) product family; ranging from 1100-1400 V and including an intrinsic body diode. Since the intrinsic ...