Circuits & Schematics - Analogue Design - 4

Figure 1 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. Both of these approaches introduce ...

Several years ago we were developing a clamp-on photometer, a hand-held instrument that could be clamped onto a communications optical fiber to indicate the presence of light, its direction of travel, and the presence of combinations of ...

When a system's specifications call for a lowpass filter with a steep frequency-cutoff characteristic, an engineer can opt for a “brick-wall”- filter design that features a sharp transition band. For example, in an FM ...

Junction field-effect transistors (JFETs) usually require some reverse bias voltage to be applied to a gate terminal. In HF and UHF applications, this bias is often provided using the voltage across the source resistor R S (Figure 1). Figure 1. ...

Self-heated transistors used as thermal air flow sensors are a particular (obsessive?) interest of mine, and over the years I must have designed dozens of variations on this theme. Figure 1 illustrates one such topology seen here (Reference 1) ...

Integration of analog circuitry with digital logic often requires the addition of an extra supply rail or two. The excellent PSRR of precision op-amps (typically 100 dB) makes them unfussy about power rail variations. This simplifies power supply ...

The circuit in Figure 1 is a single-supply version of a programmable Schmitt trigger, or a comparator with hysteresis. A comparator, A1, and a digitally programmable potentiometer (DPP1) are used for the function. The lower (V LL ) and upper (V UL ...

The challenge of improving analog/digital accuracy by preventing amplifier saturation in systems supplied with only a single logic-level power rail has been receiving a lot of activity and design creativity recently. Voltage inverters generating ...

Differential temperature measurement is a handy way to quantify the performance of heatsinks, thermoelectric coolers (TECs), and thermal control in electronic assemblies. Figure 1 illustrates an inexpensive design for a high-resolution differential ...

Conventional thermostats are based on separate temperature sensor and heater devices with means for feedback between them. But in some recent EDN design ideas (DIs) we’ve seen thermostat designs that meld the functions of sensor and heater ...