Articles and news - 4

To determine the specifications of a solar-generating plant, I needed to accurately measure the load current a product consumed...

Billions of people are facing sleep problems. According to scientific research, about one billion people alone suffer from sleep apnea, an interrupted breathing during the night. This is leading to various health consequences including snoring, daytime fatigue, along with more difficult issues such as heart problems and diabetes...

Developed as a three-terminal shunt regulator, the popular and multiple-sourced TL431 IC offers designers many intriguing possibilities beyond its intended application...

Available from multiple sources, the UC384x family of current-mode, PWM power-supply controllers offers good performance and has spawned a variety of similar ICs...

Three-phase controlled rectifiers and inverters, matrix cycloconverters, and cascaded power stages typically comprise large numbers of power transistors, each with its own driver circuit...

Sometimes, you need to distinguish between two voltages, using some hysteresis in the decision. When the levels of the compared signals vary over a wide range (for example, a few orders of magnitude), the hysteresis width should vary similarly...

ADCs with differential inputs are becoming increasingly popular. This popularity isn't surprising, because differential inputs in the ADC offer several advantages: good common-mode noise rejection, a doubling of the available dynamic range...

Vishay Intertechnology announced that the company has extended its TNPV e3 series of Automotive Grade high voltage thin film flat chip resistors with a smaller 0805 case size. The Vishay Draloric TNPV0805 e3 is the industry’s first such device in the compact 0805 case size to combine high operating voltages...

More than a half-century old, the ubiquitous and mind-bogglingly useful 555 analog timer has become a perennial object for both kudus and criticism. Most of the former and some of the latter is justified, but sometimes a supposed shortcoming will grow to the status of “common knowledge”...

This Design Idea shows how to build a reliable, low-cost, and simple inductance tester. The basis for the tester is a Pierce buffered CMOS oscillator...