Almost every engineer who has to deal with real-world signals, analog sensors, front-end circuitry, filtering, line drivers/receivers, or general amplification is familiar with the basic operational amplifier (op amp) which is the building block of most analog circuity. These op amps generally use voltage feedback (VFB), and have been studied and used extensively. However, there […]
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Eye and Constellation Diagrams, Pt 2
Part 1 looked at the eye diagram, a simple yet powerful visual tool which reveals many specifics about the quality of a recovered bit stream. Part 2 looks at the constellation diagram, another powerful visual tool which is used to show the signal space of complex encoding schemes and relationship among the symbols. Q: Why […]
Eye and Constellation Diagrams, Pt 1
Digital signals representing data symbols may be presumed to be clean, consistent representations of ones and zeroes when they are launched onto their communications medium, whether it is a wired, wireless RF, or optical fiber link. However, due to bandwidth limitations of the medium, external and internal noise, crosstalk, multipath, reflections, and many other unavoidable […]
Top analog threads on EDAboard.com – August
(editor’s note: Intrigued by the problem? Have a question or another solution? Then click the “Read more” link and follow the conversation on EDAboard.com or log in to EDAboard and participate in the analog forum threads.) MOSFET getting very hot – In this schematic, the VCC feed with a less than 1 A MOSFET gets […]
Impedance matching and the Smith Chart, Part 2
Part 1 looked at impedance matching and the need for a complex conjugate impedance at the load, compared to the source impedance. Once the need for an impedance-matching network is determined – and it is very likely needed – the next challenge is defining and creating this network. It may seem that doing a few […]
Using the Smith Chart for impedance matching, Part 1
In circuit designs spanning low-frequency audio through high-frequency RF, there’s considerable discussion about impedance matching between components or subcircuits, with various tools such as the Smith chart with is used to facilitate the matching. Q: What is impedance matching? A: Impedance matching means that a signal source sees a load impedance which is the complex […]
Mechanical vibration for electronics: the quartz crystal
It is now 100 years since Alexander Nicholson at Bell Telephone Laboratories built and patented the first crystal oscillator, and crystals are still the main source of accurate oscillations up to UHF frequencies using quartz instead of Rochelle Salt (see US patent 2212845). Quartz crystal oscillators use the piezoelectric effect. The piezoelectric effect refers to […]
Analog switch vs. digital switch ICs
Analog switch integrated chips (ICs), when turned on, will conduct both analog and digital signals from the input pin to the output pin. Digital switches can only accept digital signals and duplicate the logic level on the input pin at the output pin. When the digital switch is turned off, it returns to a default […]
Top analog threads on EDAboard.com – July
(editor’s note: Intrigued by the problem? Have a question or another solution? Then click the “Read more” link and follow the conversation on EDAboard.com or log in to EDAboard and participate in the analog forum threads.) Simulate a simple differential amplifier – My current source is 50 uA but the drain current of M16, M29 […]
Open source hardware development framework for IC designs
efabless corporation, an online design platform and marketplace for community-developed intellectual property (IP) and integrated circuits (ICs), today introduced Chiplicity, an open source framework for community members to create, share, make derivatives of and commercialize mixed-signal ICs. “Chiplicity is a first of its kind and extends the efabless electronics community engineering concept from IP to […]