Articles - 11

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 ...

Introduction The high dv/dt and di/dt switching transients during MOSFET commutation are the chief sources of both conducted and radiated EMI from switching DC/DC regulators. While the optimization of PCB layout for gallium-nitride (GaN) switching ...

Machine vision systems use very short flashes of intense light to produce high speed images used in a wide variety of data processing applications. For instance, fast moving conveyor belts are run through machine vision systems for quick label and ...

Over the past few decades, the circuit board and electronics industry have seen tremendous innovation and technological advancement. Consequently, many types of circuit boards have emerged to fulfill the different electronics and industrial ...

For containing large amounts of bulk capacitance, controlling inrush currents poses problems. The simplest approach involves placing an inrush-limiting resistor in series with the capacitor bank, but a resistor wastes power and adds a voltage drop. ...

Reducing low-frequency (1/f) noise generated by an IC voltage reference can prove difficult. In theory, adding a lowpass filter to a reference's output reduces noise. In practice, a lowpass RC filter for suppression of noise frequencies below ...

The simple circuit shown accomplishes full-wave signal rectification with only one transistor (Fig. 1). This is done by exploiting the “gain reversal” phenomenon exhibited by a saturated bipolar transistor. This circuit will find ...

The human ear is very good at detecting noise or missing cycles in a waveform, and since we have two ears, we can monitor two signals at once. I recently repaired an older lab instrument containing a quadrature encoder made with an incandescent ...

For most applications, current measurements are made by sensing the voltage drop across a resistor. There are two locations in a circuit that resistors are commonly placed for current measurements. The first location is between the power supply and ...

It’s been nearly six years since we unleashed the $5 Raspberry Pi Zero on an unsuspecting world. Of all the products we’ve launched, Zero is still the one I’m proudest of: it most perfectly embodies our mission to give people ...