Circuits & Schematics Oscillators

The original bipolar 555 timer, the NE555 , is excellent for driving a power MOSFET’s gate. Newer CMOS versions such as the 7555, LMC555, and TLC555 use less power, but they have trouble sourcing enough current to drive a gate well and can ...

The growth of battery-operated applications has put steady pressure on designers to steeply reduce their products’ operational power consumption and bring standby power as close to zero as possible by carefully managing the devices’ ...

A few years ago, I worked at a disk-drive company. We had a plating facility that required square waves to drive the high-voltage plating operation. The challenge was that the square wave's pulse width had to be variable, along with the duty ...

Plumbing a laboratory with a standard frequency makes a lot of sense if the lab uses multiple frequency counters, spectrum analyzers, and other frequency-dependent test equipment. Rather than spending time keeping all of the instruments' ...

EDN Most oscillator circuits include a nonlinear amplitude control that sustains oscillations at a desired amplitude with minimum output distortion. One approach uses the output sinusoid's amplitude to control a circuit element's ...

Gavin Watkins EDN A recent project evaluated the feasibility of a dynamic load modulation (DLM) RF power amplifier for 5G. DLM amplifiers typically use high-voltage varactor diodes in their output network, which need to be driven by high-speed ...

Jordan Dimitrov EDN Pulse-width modulation (PWM) is the best conversion method to use for digitally-controlled variable DC voltage sources requiring high accuracy and resolution. Invented 50 years ago [1, 2], the PWM approach is widely used today ...

Glen Brisebois EDN I recently had the opportunity to investigate a new micropower 6-MHz LTC6255 op amp driving a 12-bit, 250k sample/sec LTC2361 ADC. I wanted to acquire the FFT of a pure sinusoid of about 5 kHz. The problem is that getting the FFT ...

Davinder Oberoi EDN A common circuit in electronics is the square-wave, astable multivibrator (one-shot), which is useful for various purposes, such as timing circuits and audible alarms. The most common way to generate the desired square wave is ...

Shyam Tiwari EDN Digital oscillators often generate TTL- or CMOS-level outputs, referred to ground. Generating a symmetric bipolar output with respect to ground presents a challenge. In this design, four 1.5 V flashlight cells create 3 V voltage ...