Articles and news - 6

It is advantageous to know if there is a valid signal on a differential signal bus. This Design Idea detects differential data transmission and reports a loss of signal (LOS) to a microcontroller or other monitoring device...

Many applications require special differential amplifiers that achieve both high performance and low power dissipation...

In many electronic circuits, there is always a demand for a device to isolate or separate one circuit from another. This special device is called a buffer...

A common problem for digital potentiometers (DigiPots) is the effect of wiper resistance, which produces quite noticeable non-linearities of regulation at both ends of the resistance range...

A handheld, battery-operated “fiber finder” measures the light escaping from an optical fiber when clamped in a V-shaped block under slight pressure. A pair of photodiodes on each side of the resulting bend compares analog levels...

When the Sun is shining and illumination is needed inside a dimly lit interior space, a popular, proven, and highly efficient solution is to utilize the energy of available sunlight in the simplest and most sustainable fashion conceivable...

Figure shows two large-signal- measurement methods. The first uses a two-resistor voltage divider and an output buffer, and the second comprises an attenuating inverter and a high-value input resistor...

All thermal anemometers work by inferring air speed from measurements of thermal impedance (Z) between a heated sensor and the surrounding air...

In Part 1 of this article, we briefly looked at the Wien bridge oscillator before homing in on the bi-quad filter as our best candidate for an oscillator capable of giving <0.0001%/–120 dB distortion, and showed its full circuit...

Over the years, the Design Ideas (DI) column has featured many interesting oscillators, but none that I can recall was specifically designed to produce a really clean sine wave...