Articles and news - 2

You often need to measure current during circuit design and debugging. You can perform that task by breaking a path, inserting a shunt resistor, measuring its voltage, and converting the voltage to current. Unfortunately, that approach is sometimes impractical...

An interesting variation on the theme of digital to analog converters is the digital potentiometer...

Boost converters, like other switchers, have traditionally received their control signals from a dedicated circuit. However, a recent trend is to integrate simple switching-power-supply building blocks into generic devices, such as microcontrollers...

The solar panels are operating at optimal parameters when they are at the perfect right angle to the sun. Unfortunately this is accomplished only if solar panels are rotated by the sun...

By decoding the commands sent by a direct-broadcast satellite receiver that uses the DISEqC protocol, you can troubleshoot the commands or simply listen in...

Frequent design idea contributor, Peter Demchenko, recently published “Extending the resolution of a peripheral DAC”. In it, Peter describes an inverting dual-supply amplifier circuit that he says is intended “…to improve the resolution of a peripheral DAC...

Toshiba Electronics Europe has extended its range of intelligent power devices (IPD) for brushless DC (BLDC) motor drive applications. The new devices are suited to use in pumps, air conditioning, ventilation, fans and other similar applications...

To test a gigabit-speed data-recovery chip, you need a clock with a controllable duty cycle. Because most pattern and clock generators have a fixed duty-cycle output of 50%, the design may require a small circuit to distort the duty cycle...

Powering LEDs from a wide dc range – say, 30 to 380 V – without wasting a lot of power in the regulating block, is a difficult task when the LED current needs to be constant...

This design idea shows how easily “new flesh can be added to the old bones” and how some new functions can be added to the simple LED display that was published earlier...