July 24, 2008[Design FAQs] Digital Potentiometers
Download the full article as a .PDF, sponsored by Analog What are digital potentiometers, and how are they used? Digital potentiometers are integrated circuits that implement a resistive ladder and a digital means of addressing a particular tap on the ladder that corresponds to the wiper position of a mechanical potentiometer. They’re used to...
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Don Tuite
July 24, 2008[Pease Porridge] Bob's Mailbox
HI BOB, I am trying to build a test circuit that will produce a pulse current from a capacitor. My target is around 200 A at 100 ms. Is this possible? We have an instrument called a PVI that does the same only at lower current and at shorter duration, but I don’t know how it is being controlled. I hope you can give me advice or a basic control circuit that I can start working on. –ROMMEL C. VILLON HELLO, MR. VILLON, You...
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Bob Pease
July 15, 2008
[Technology In The News] Checklist Helps Pick Analog/M-S, RF Foundry
The Global Semiconductor Alliance’s Analog/Mixed-Signal/Radio Frequency (AMS/RF) Process Checklist Version 1.0 aims to make it easier for semiconductor companies to obtain information on an AMS/RF foundry process. It specifically targets the information need to evaluate a foundry’s AMS/RF process and determine if it addresses all of the company’s needs.
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ED News Staff
July 10, 2008[Ideas For Design] Create A 250-MHz Bandwidth Digital Potentiometer For Video Level Control
A circuit used to control the level of a video signal should have a 3-dB cutoff frequency of greater than 5 MHz for a television application or 100 MHz for a monitor application. CMOS-based digital potentiometers typically cannot be used as video devices because their frequency responses barely exceed 1 MHz. For such applications, a good choice would be a variable-gain amplifier (VGA) with analog or digital gain control. VGAs are offered...
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Oleg Ayranov
, et al.
July 10, 2008[Pease Porridge] What's All This Sudoku Stuff, Anyhow?
I suspect most of you have seen these “logical” puzzles in many newspapers (not to mention little books). They consist of putting numbers into squares so each big square of nine squares has every number, one through nine. Likewise, so does every row and every column. The easy ones are too easy, and the hard ones are substantially impossible. But the moderate ones are fairly challenging and satisfying. Sudoku is a big time-waster, and I won’t recommend anybody...
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Bob Pease
June 26, 2008[Pease Porridge] Bob's Mailbox
HI BOB, I have been collecting some new but mostly museum-grade test instruments. Along with purchases from various instrument rental houses, flea markets, and so on, for a while I bid on items in government liquidation auctions. Occasionally, I won. The starting bid was always $50, and some I got at that price. Some went way higher but seldom approached the original list price, and I gave up way before that. Often, the shipping costs to a pickup and forward...
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Bob Pease
June 11, 2008
[ED Bookstore] Linear Circuit Design Handbook
What Zumbahlen did here is basically give order to all those ADI app notes and technical articles. He also tagged related ideas to such content in a coherent sequence. If you need to know something with this kind of treeware, you can be your own search engine using the table of contents and index in the rear of the book. Or of course you can skim for the stuff you don’t already know.
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Don Tuite
June 12, 2008[Engineering Essentials] Bridge-Tied Load Amplifiers
It’s possible to build a push-pull amplifier using amplifier ICs, rather than discretes, as in the traditional class B amp (see the figure). A bridged-amplifier configuration effectively doubles the voltage swing at the load. It’s also possible to build a bridge amplifier in which one stage drives one side of the speaker and a second unity-gain inverting amplifier drives the other side of the speaker. However, the...
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Don Tuite
June 10, 2008
[Engineering Essentials] HVVFETs—New In Town
The HVVFET is the brainchild of HVVi chief technology officer Bob Davies, one of the key inventors of LDMOS 15 years ago. Devices utilize a vertical FET structure (something that’s been tried before) because it provides higher power density than lateral devices. The problem with those early efforts were the parasitics associated with silicon substrates. That limited operating frequencies. For HVVi, Davies came up with a novel edge termination structure and a unique gate-drain ...
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Don Tuite
June 12, 2008[Engineering Essentials] Back To Amp Camp
Amplifiers are fundamental circuit-design elements. They drive everything from earbuds to antennas. Placed ahead of analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), they reshape signals from sources as diverse as strain-gauges to ultrasound probes. Through proper selection of feedback passives, they can be configured into high-pass, low-pass, band-pass, and band-elimination filters. Feed them with multiple signals, and they produce harmonic series of all the...
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Don Tuite
June 12, 2008[Engineering Feature] Linear Technologies: Analog's Success In A Digital Era
The mainstream media may call it a digital age. But today’s gadgets still need integrated circuits that can transform analog signals—which convey information about “real world” phenomena like temperature, pressure, sound, and speed—into digital form. Linear Technologies is one of the leading companies designing, manufacturing, and marketing a broad line of standard high-performance analog integrated circuits as well as devices that control power and regulate voltage in...
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Lou Sosa
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