Thyristors or silicon controlled rectifiers (SCRs) and TRIACs are simple bipolar devices which probably get forgotten in this high-tech, CMOS, MOSFET, digital world. A thyristor is a PNPN bipolar device, compared to a normal bipolar transistor which will be PNP or NPN. A common way of explaining their operation is to visualize the thyristor as […]
Put your finger on it: capacitive touch switching
Rather than a physical switch it is now common to use “touch” switches to interface to many types of electronic equipment. Smartphones are an obvious example but touch switches are now in cars, oscilloscopes, ovens and many other types of industrial and consumer electronics. A touch screen will usually be a specialized screen with a […]
Power Status: battery monitors matter
For battery powered systems it can be useful to know something about the state of the battery in order to predict remaining battery life. With specific charge/discharge information, you could also manage battery consuming resources to maximize battery life. There are integrated circuits to help with either approach. For simple charge or discharge information, a […]
Are your op amps pumped?
I was recently thinking about the issues surrounding rail to rail input opamps and the problems of making them low distortion – a problem I have had to overcome when designing integrated circuits for instrumentation applications. Some rail to rail opamps use two input stages – one using NMOS input transistors, the other using PMOS […]
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The formidable forgotten FETs
The world is full of MOSFETs — they are the cornerstone of most ICs. However, the humble JFET still exists, although it is a bit of a niche market now and not always easy to find. Vishay, who took over the Siliconix brand many years ago, seem to have dropped JFETs now, although Siliconix was one […]
Breathing new life into an old oscilloscope
My current oscilloscope is a four-channel, high-speed, deep memory instrument which is still good for analog work in spite of its age. Newer analog oscilloscopes often have mixed signal options with eight or more digital channels. Even for an analog engineer, these can be useful as you can often be working with ADCs, DACs or […]
Minimizing Mister Miller in transistors
I briefly mentioned the Miller effect in an earlier blog on cascode amplifiers but thought it was worthy of a more detailed discussion. The Miller effect or Miller capacitance was first published by John M Miller in 1920 – “Dependence of the input impedance of a three-electrode vacuum tube upon the load in the plate […]
The perils of peak detects
My previous blog touched on peak detect circuits. What seems simple in principle can be quite problematic if you want speed and accuracy. A diode and a capacitor makes a crude peak detect but the voltage drop of the diode makes it a poor choice so you will normally add an opamp to improve accuracy. […]
Pulse signal processing: what to watch out for
A number of systems I have developed have required the processing of pulsed analog signals. Depending on the system, one or more attributes of the signal needed to be preserved and measured such as pulse height, pulse width, pulse shape and pulse position in time. Also, you usually need some gain to boost the signal […]
The Art of Electronics
In 1980, the book “The Art of Electronics” was published, written by Paul Horowitz and Winfield Hill. For many people, myself included, it became the first book you picked up when you needed to know anything related to analog electronics. It was intended as a course textbook but became a designers reference book for many […]
