Circuits & Schematics

An obstacle detection unit is an essential part of a variety of projects, such as robotics and security applications. The infrared sensors are widely used for these types of applications. The main drawback of some circuit designs is that the ...

It’s common for I 2 C systems to have both standard and fast devices on the same bus. For I 2 C systems, the speed and power consumption both depend on the values of pullup resistors: the values of them should be low enough to secure the fast ...

In electrical heating applications, resistive heaters are powered through phase angle-controlled SCR/triac circuits to vary the applied voltage/power to maintain the required temperature. Phase angle control produces a lot of harmonics leading to ...

Although adequate for undemanding applications, the circuit suffers from several drawbacks which may limit its suitability. The Darlington’s current gain (which can vary considerably from device to device and with temperature) plays a ...

Awhile back I published a simple design idea for a thermal airspeed sensor based on a self-heated Darlington transistor pair (Ref, 1). The resulting sensor is simple, sensitive, and solid-state, but suffers from a radically nonlinear airspeed ...

This design for a photonic switch needs more than approximately 70 V at the cathode of a duo-lateral optical position-sensing device. This voltage gets speedy response at longer wavelengths, such as 980 nm. The circuit uses fast transimpedance ...

In developing electronic systems, designers look for products or ideas that may benefit from the better performance, smaller size, lower cost, and improved reliability that an IC can offer. Toward that end, the digital potentiometer emerged as an ...

A previous Design Idea [ 1 ] outlined a relatively simple circuit in which a momentary pushbutton could be made to function like a latching, mechanical switch. The article generated a good deal of reader feedback. Amongst other comments, readers ...

Capacitor type charge pumps are a well-known, simple, efficient, cost-effective (and therefore popular!) method for inverting and multiplying voltage supply rails. Perhaps less well known, however, is that they also work just as well for dividing ...

The Power Integrations TOPSwitch family of integrated flyback-regulator ICs provides exceptional performance in small, low-pin-count packages. For the lowest-pin-count packages, the multifunction, or M, pin serves multiple purposes, including ...