Digitally controlled potentiometers are useful for generating analog control voltages under the control of a microcontroller. In some applications, manual pushbutton switches could replace a microcontroller and simplify product design. Mechanical ...
Class D audio amplifiers provide a dual benefit for battery-powered portable devices (Figure 1). They enhance battery life, and they produce much less power dissipation than do their linear cousins. Those features make Class D amplifiers ideal ...
A universal problem in battery-operated devices is the threat of damage when an end user (never an engineer) inserts the battery backward. You can avoid damage by inserting a single diode or by using a diode-bridge configuration, but those fixes ...
The simple circuit in Figure 1 uses a low-current-drain MAX4073H amplifier to sense the current flowing through a 4- to 20-mA loop. The circuit senses the current through a 1 Ω resistor with a fixed gain of 100 and uses no battery or dc power ...
Perhaps the most effective way to gain board space and increase component density is to minimize wiring on the board. A widely used architecture that allows such miniaturization is the I 2 C bus. Comprising only a bidirectional data line, SDA, and ...
Because of internal circuit-breaker delay and limited MOS-gate pulldown current, many hot-swap controllers do not limit current during the first 10 to 50 µsec following a shorted output. The result can be a brief flow of several hundred ...
You use high-side current monitoring in many battery-powered products that require accurate monitoring of load current, charger current, or both. In applications for nonportable designs, high-side-current monitoring serves as a power-supply ...
An ac-based continuity tester for front-line test-and-repair jobs provides a simple go/no-go test for localizing faults in multiconductor cables (Figure 1). Open circuits are more likely to occur at the connector ends. This tool helps to identify ...
Accurate op amps have high open-loop gain, low offset voltage and current, low voltage and current noise, and low distortion. However, they often lack the ability to provide high output currents while maintaining all the other high-accuracy ...
The gate-turn-on threshold voltage for GaAs MESFETs (gallium-arsenide metal-semiconductor field-effect transistors) varies considerably from part to part, even within a given lot. That behavior makes biasing difficult, especially if you want to ...