Circuits & Schematics - 4

Designers sometimes need to analyze the spectrum of a modulated carrier. Although they can do this by down-converting and then digitizing and signal processing in the digital domain, the high-speed analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and the ...

Because of internal circuit-breaker delay and limited MOS-gate pulldown current, many hot-swap controllers do not limit current during the first 10 to 50 µsec following a shorted output. The result can be a brief flow of several hundred ...

Designers often use thermistors rather than other temperature sensors because thermistors offer high sensitivity, compactness, low cost, and small time constants. But most thermistors' resistance-versus-temperature characteristics are highly ...

The simple ADC in Figure 1 is perfect for getting analog signals into a purely digital microcontroller. Using just five surface-mount parts, you can assemble it for less than 50 cents (1000), which is approximately half the cost of a ...

For safety reasons, a motor that drives a safety-critical electromechanical assembly often includes an electromagnetic brake on its drive shaft. The brake typically comprises a solenoid coil that actuates a mechanical clutch, and, when you power ...

Digital potentiometers are versatile devices; you can use them in many filtering and waveform-generation applications. This Design Idea describes an oscillator in which setting the resistance of two digital potentiometers independently programs the ...

You sometimes need an inexpensive VCO that can produce evenly spaced three-phase outputs over a wide frequency range. You could use tracking all-phase filters with only one oscillator, but this technique is difficult to implement and offers limited ...

Deadband circuits find applications in servo-control systems. A precision current source and a half-wave inverting rectifier form a positive deadband circuit (Figure 1). The REF01 , IC 1 , is a precision 10 V voltage reference. It forms a precision ...

Digital-system designs require you to consider many core voltages. Memory operates at 1.8 V, I 2 C and FPGA devices operate at 3.3 V, microcontrollers operate at 5 V, and charge-coupled-device image sensors operate at 9 to 8 V. Clocks for each ...

A typical window comparator uses two comparators and a single op amp to determine whether a voltage is inside or outside a boundary region. Figure 1 shows a typical implementation. IC 1 is an inverting op amp with a gain of 1. V REF and V REF ...