Let’s imagine that you need to add a power switch to something that’s battery-powered but processor-free; perhaps it must also be waterproof and thus membrane-sealed. Or perhaps you just want to use a shiny modern push-button rather ...
The CD4011 CMOS NAND gate has a typical input current of 10 pA at room temperature. You can charge a capacitor connected to the gate input with currents on the order of hundreds of picoamperes and neglect the influence of the gate-input current on ...
It is common practice to power a MOSFET with a comparator and with an unregulated voltage and to power the comparator driving it from a regulated one (Figure 1). Many loads are insensitive to driving voltage, so it would be a waste of money and ...
A high-side current-sense amplifier, IC 1 , offers a simple method of combining low-speed clocks or other signals with dc power in cables between subsystems (Figure 1). Designed for monitoring charge and discharge current in secondary batteries, IC ...
Way back in 1986, famed analog innovator Jim Williams, in “Designs for High Performance Voltage-to-Frequency Converters” ( Reference 1 ) published his “King Kong” 100 MHz VFC. I have never seen its equal. Certainly Figure ...
There are several applications at home or industry for long delay timers (ON or OFF delay). Time delays on the order of seconds can be generated using 555 timer circuits, provided the timing capacitor values do not exceed the limit specified by 555 ...
Psychologists tell us that frustration increases drive. I was driven to produce the circuit in this design idea by my increasing frustration with a collection of digital thermometers, all of which claimed accuracy to within 0.1 C but the readings ...
An excerpt from Christopher Paul’s “Parsing PWM (DAC) performance: Part 1 Mitigating errors” ( Ref. 1 ): “I was surprised to discover that when an output of a popular µP I’ve been using is configured to be a ...
The 0- to 20-mA current loop is a reliable means of data communication in industrial applications. These circuits use a precision shunt in the receiver to convert the current signal into a voltage signal. Accidentally connecting the precision ...
Despite the title, this DI does not describe a gadget to tell you when to don your shades, but instead features a useful add-on to (analog) audio kit. Built into a mixer, for example, it will show when the output of any stage is approaching ...