Circuit Response
every model has an edge, and the figure carries it
Concept

Synthetic inductor — where it appears

An inductance produced by an active network rather than by a winding, most often a gyrator terminated in a capacitor. It has no magnetic core to saturate and no stray field, and in exchange it has a supply, a noise floor, an amplitude limit and an upper frequency that a wound inductor does not.

Named by 5 essays across 2 fields — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.

A one-henry inductor with nothing magnetic in it, good for 3.6 decades. computed by solving, not by drawing. The impedance at the input of an Antoniou impedance converter, read as an inductance: a current source drives the node and the voltage is solved for, and the imaginary part divided by ω is what is plotted. Five components — four resistors of 10 kΩ and a 10 nF capacitor — behave as 1000 mH, which as a wound coil would be several henries of wire. It is that inductance to within one per cent from 1.00 Hz to 3.65 kHz, 3.56 decades, and the upper edge belongs to the amplifiers rather than to the arrangement: with ideal ones in the same netlist the inductance is exact everywhere drawn. Nothing in it stores energy in a magnetic field — the current lags because an amplifier is holding a capacitor's voltage somewhere else in the loop.

The inductor that is an amplifier

Four resistors and a capacitor, arranged around two amplifiers, present one henry at a node — an inductance with nothing magnetic in it, which as a wound coil would be several henries of wire. It is that inductance to within one per cent over three and a half decades, and its series resistance goes negative at 63 hertz, which is well inside the band where it is still an excellent inductor. A resonator built around it there does not have a high quality factor; it has a negative loss, and starts on its own noise.

filters · Gyrator One component of a gyrator moves the response by 0.50; the passive ladder's inductor moves it by 3e-8. computed by solving, not by drawing. The magnitude sensitivity at the passband maximum of a gyrator ladder, against the resistance scale the gyrators are built at, for a single component and for the combination of both halves that actually changes the synthesised inductance. The passive ladder realising the identical response is at 3.2e-8. A single component sits at about a half whatever the resistance scale is, and the combination falls as one over it — the 0.97 power over 3 decades. So the stationarity has not been destroyed, it has become a statement about a combination of components rather than about a component, and independent parts do not come in combinations.

One inductor, and ten components

The rung below built an inductor out of an amplifier and ended with a boundary that is not a frequency: one end of it is soldered to ground. A ladder's series inductors are floating, so making one takes four amplifiers rather than two — and the four-amplifier version is exactly floating, to five figures, and reproduces the ladder's response to a hundredth of a decibel. It does not reproduce its stationarity. Each of a gyrator's ten components moves the response by exactly a half, where the inductor it replaced moved it by ten to the minus eight.

filters · Gyrator Correcting a 20 Ω, 50 mH load to unity, and what it stores. computed by solving, not by drawing. A capacitor across a 230 V, 50 Hz supply is swept from nothing to 300 µF against a load drawing 1636 W and 1285 var. The reactive power falls through zero at 77.31 µF and keeps going; the energy stored in the installation rises from 2044.9 mJ to 4089.7 mJ at that point — exactly twice, because unity power factor means the two stores are equal — and goes on rising afterwards. Only the cable current has a least value, 7.113 A against 9.044 A.

The energy a unity power factor doubles

Reactive power was computed three ways on this site and the agreement was called a verification. Two of the three are one theorem written twice and cannot disagree about anything; only the third is independent, and what it computes is a difference. Correcting a 20 Ω, 50 mH load to a power factor of 1.000000 takes its reactive power from 1,285 var to nothing and takes the energy stored in the installation from 2,044.9 mJ to 4,089.7 mJ — exactly twice, at every load and every frequency.

power · Reactive power What the accuracy costs: dynamic range against the resistance scale. computed by solving, not by drawing. The rung below found the active realisation's response converging on the passive one's as the resistance scale rises. This is the price. The floor rises as the square root of the scale — fitted at 0.500 — because the resistors are the noise. The largest internal swing rises as the scale itself — fitted at 1.012 — because each gyrator forces the inductor's own current through its own resistors, so an amplifier inside it carries that current times R. Dynamic range on a ±15 V supply therefore falls as the three-halves power: 78 dB at 100 kΩ and 18 dB at 10 MΩ. The passive ladder realising the same response has 141 dB, and its worst internal node carries 1.10 times the input.

Eight amplifiers, and what they add

The rung below realised a Chebyshev ladder out of floating gyrators and found the response converging on the passive one's as the resistance scale rises — twenty-two decibels out at ten kilohms, a twentieth of a decibel at ten megohms. It closed by naming two quantities it had not measured. They are the same quantity: the resistors that buy the accuracy are the noise, and the amplifiers inside the gyrators carry the inductor's own current through them, so the floor rises as the square root of the scale and the ceiling falls as the scale.

filters · Gyrator The sign change follows the 0.51 power of the amplifier, not the inductor. computed by solving, not by drawing. Both of the arrangement's frequency boundaries against the gain–bandwidth of the two amplifiers in it, over three decades. The lower curve is the frequency at which the series resistance changes sign, bisected on the sign of the real part; the upper one is where the inductance leaves one per cent. The crossing grows as the 0.513 power of the gain–bandwidth, and the dashed prediction over it is ½√(f_c·f_p) — half the geometric mean of the arrangement's own corner r/2πL = 1.59 kHz and the amplifier's open-loop pole f_t/A₀ — which is inside one per cent while that pole is at least fifteen times below the corner and 8.7 per cent out at the top of the sweep, where it is not. The two boundaries stay between 1.61 and 2.30 per cent of one another throughout, so a faster amplifier moves the active region rather than removing it.

The boundary that improves when the part gets worse

A synthetic inductor's series resistance changes sign at 63.0 Hz with one-megahertz amplifiers, and that frequency is not a property of the inductor. It is half the geometric mean of the arrangement's own corner and the amplifier's open-loop pole — half the square root of their product, which the bisection confirms to a part in a thousand — and it therefore falls as the amplifier's direct-current gain rises, from 686 Hz at a gain of a thousand to 19.9 Hz at a million. The quantity that decides whether a resonator starts does not move at all: it is the transition frequency over four times the Q, 2.50 kHz for a tank of a hundred.

filters · Gyrator

Named alongside it

The objects these essays reach for when they reach for this one.

GyratorQuality factorModel rangeDesign tradeoffGain–bandwidth productNegative resistanceNullorRealisationComplex powerComponent sensitivityComponent toleranceDynamic range

All concepts