Articles and news - 8

Most operational amplifiers have input and output electrostatic discharge protection diodes. These diodes are designed for protection from ESD damage during device testing and product assembly...

If you've ever designed an RF oscillator, you've probably encountered squegging. Sometimes called "motor boating," squegging causes oscillators to start and stop at frequencies much lower than the frequency of interest...

Famous analog designer and author Jim Williams published an awesome design in 1986 for a 100-MHz voltage to frequency converter...

In operational amplifier stability, one rule of thumb is to allow 45 degrees of phase margin. Other design guidelines state that 60 degrees is best; still others say that 30 degrees is sufficient. These numbers are all attempts to ensure stable performance over a range of variables...

Microcontrollers must often read the status of switches in control applications. A typical switch configuration uses pullup resistors on both of the switches to pull the signals high or low for the microcontroller to read...

Differential signaling is a common technique for obtaining high noise immunity for critical signals in high-speed digital pc-board systems. The pc board's traces, carrying differential signals, are often edge-coupled offset striplines, with the traces sandwiched between two reference planes...

In this second part, we’ll look at some alternative ways of arranging things for other possible applications...

An ongoing project (or gadget) called for a means of generating an audio output to represent a varying voltage level. Ho hum: that sounds like a voltage-controlled oscillator...

Imagine that you have a voltage source in series with some source resistance feeding power to a variable load. The relationship between load voltage, load current, and cell current can be drawn...

The recent Design Idea “Getting an audio signal with a THD < 0.0002% made easy” discloses a low THD sine generator which led me to dust off a design...