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

Voltage divider — where it appears

Two impedances in series across a source, whose ratio sets the fraction of it appearing at their junction only while nothing draws current there. What it does not know about is the load, and the error that ignorance costs is the whole content of the first essay in this collection's networks field.

Named by 8 essays across 3 fields — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.

A 10 kΩ + 10 kΩ divider, solved with its load. The unloaded answer is 6.00 V. It is 1% low at a load of 495 kΩ and 4.00 V at a load equal to the divider's own resistance. The ratio does not predict any of this; the magnitude does.

The divider, and the thing it does not know about

A two-resistor divider's output is set by the ratio of its resistances — with nothing connected. Connect anything at all and what decides the answer is the quantity the ratio was built to discard: the magnitude. Two dividers of identical ratio give six volts and one volt into the same load.

networks · Divider Where a switch is a switch: a band, and the 6.43 MHz at which it closes. computed by solving, not by drawing. A switch of 0.5 Ω closed, 100 MΩ open and 5 pF across it is within 1.0% of being ideal only for loads between 49.5 Ω and 1.01 MΩ — 4.31 decades, and both edges are the same part. The upper edge is a frequency as well as a resistance, because the off-capacitance shunts the open switch: it falls a decade per decade above 318 Hz and meets the lower edge at 6.43 MHz, where the band closes and no load at all will do. Checked by scanning every load at 1.3 times that frequency and finding the best possible error to be 1.17%.

A band rather than an edge

Every other boundary in this collection is one-sided: a model is true below a frequency, or below an amplitude. A switch is a switch only for loads between 49.5 ohms and 1.01 megohms — bounded at both ends by the same part — and the upper end is a frequency as well as a resistance, so the band narrows as the frequency rises and shuts completely at 6.43 megahertz, above which no load resistance at all will do.

limits · Ideal switch A divider of 4 equal 1.0% resistors, solved 3000 times. computed by solving, not by drawing. Every resistor drawn from its tolerance band and the divider solved, 3000 times. The worst case is ±1.000% — the part tolerance itself, and it does not improve when the divider is built from more parts — while the measured spread is 0.2944% and the worst of 3000 draws reached 82% of the bound. The root-sum-square, offered as though it were a standard deviation, is 1.70 of one here: for uniformly distributed parts it is √3 σ, a coverage of about 92%.

The tolerance that is not on any part

Four one per cent resistors in a divider give an answer whose worst case is one per cent, whose measured spread is 0.29 per cent, and whose root-sum-square bound — offered everywhere as though it were a standard deviation — is 1.70 of one. Adding parts does not move the worst case at all and shrinks the spread as one over their root, so the gap between the promise and the fact widens with every resistor. And the same arithmetic draws a boundary in tolerance rather than in frequency: an R–2R ladder is a twelve-bit converter only while its resistors are inside 0.14 per cent.

networks · Component tolerance A threshold crossed once, in 20k samples of noise. With no hysteresis the comparator changes its mind 22.7 times on average and as many as 29, on a signal that crosses the threshold once. The vertical bars are the range over twelve seeds. The expected number of extra transitions falls below a tenth at 3.57 standard deviations — so the hysteresis a threshold needs is set by the noise under it and not by the signal over it.

Two thresholds because there is a floor

A comparator with one threshold, watching a slow signal cross it once, changes its mind 22.7 times on average and as many as 29 — because there is noise under the signal and no threshold is ever crossed once. Hysteresis fixes it, and how much is needed is a multiple of the noise's own standard deviation rather than a voltage: 3.57 of them here. The multiple grows with how long the threshold is watched, and slowly — a hundredfold longer record needs three times the hysteresis, not a hundred times.

applied · Hysteresis A 350 Ω bridge, with ideal leads. The straight line is the expression every textbook gives, Vδ/4; the curve is the solve. They part company at half the fractional change — 0.498% at 1.0% — so the tangent is worth one per cent only up to 2.020%. Driving the bridge from a current source instead halves the departure at every point and moves that edge to 4.040%.

The bridge that is linear near one point

The expression for a Wheatstone bridge's output is V delta over four, and the solve says it is V delta over two times two plus delta — low by half the fractional change, exactly, at every change tested. So the tangent is worth one per cent only up to a two per cent change and a tenth of a per cent only up to two tenths. Driving the bridge from a current source instead halves the departure at every point and doubles both edges, which is a change of one component and no change at all to the four resistors being measured.

applied · Bridge The capacitor across the upper resistor: 90.9° of margin at 836.5 pF, and less ripple past it. The regulator's phase margin against a capacitor across the upper divider resistor, with the output ripple the 1000 µF reservoir leaves beside it. With no capacitor the margin is 46.47° at a crossover of 9.73 kHz, the output impedance at 10 kHz is 1.95 Ω, the worst rail rejection is 5.79 dB and the ripple 60.62 mV. The margin is greatest, 90.929°, at 836.5 pF — a zero at 6.34 kHz and a pole at 25.4 kHz around a crossover moved to 16.9 kHz — where the output impedance at 10 kHz is 828 mΩ, the worst rail rejection -1.50 dB and the ripple 52.33 mV. At 10 nF the margin has fallen back to 66.34° and the ripple is 35.40 mV.

The capacitor across the upper resistor

The rejection essay said a regulator reproduces its reference times its divider's four, and that a capacitor across the lower divider resistor brings that down to one at high frequency. Measured, the loop peaks the reference's gain to 5.68 near its crossover before any capacitor is added; a nanofarad across the lower resistor raises the peak to 11.2; and the capacitor that brings it down belongs across the upper resistor, where a nanofarad keeps the gain from ever exceeding four. The same capacitor is a lead pair in the loop: 836.5 picofarads takes the phase margin from 46.5 to 90.9 degrees, and ten nanofarads, past that optimum, still holds 66 while cutting the output ripple from 60.6 millivolts to 35.4.

applied · Regulator Three dividers in a row, and where the error actually is. computed by solving, not by drawing. Three two-resistor dividers cascaded with nothing between them. The product of their ratios is 0.1250 and the solved output is 0.076923, 38.5% low at a staircase of ×1. Decomposed stage by stage with the rest of the chain in place — and the product of those three is the answer exactly — they are 0.3846, 0.4000, 0.5000: the LAST stage is exactly its own ratio because nothing is connected to it, and the error is at the front, which is the opposite of where a probe goes. Staggering each stage's impedance up by a factor takes the departure down in proportion, fitted exponent -0.993, so a decade a stage is within 4.88% and two decades within 0.50% — which is why a chain that has to be right is built as a staircase and not out of one value repeated.

The stage that is wrong is the far one

Three identical ten-kilohm dividers in a row give 0.076923 rather than the product of their ratios, 0.125 — 38.5 per cent low. Decomposed stage by stage with the rest of the chain in place, and the product of those three is the answer exactly, they are 0.3846, 0.4000 and 0.5000: the LAST stage is exactly its own ratio because nothing is connected to it, and the error is entirely at the front, which is the opposite end from where a probe goes. Staggering each stage's impedance up by a factor takes the departure down in proportion — fitted exponent −0.993.

networks · Divider The current divider, and the resistance that is not in the branch. computed by solving, not by drawing. A current source into two parallel branches, the metered one 10.0 kΩ and the other 1.00 kΩ. The metered branch takes 0.090909 of the current, which is the OTHER branch's resistance over the sum; writing the subscripts the way a voltage divider writes them gives 0.90909, a different number at every ratio but one. The dual of a voltmeter's finite resistance is an ammeter's non-zero one, and the threshold has the same shape with the roles exchanged: one per cent of error at 111.1 Ω, which is that resistance over ninety-nine to 1.7e-12%. And the headline of the loaded divider holds in the dual too — two current dividers of identical ratio read 0.04762 and 0.09090 into one hundred-ohm meter — while a perfect ammeter reads them identically.

The branch the other resistance decides

A voltage divider's output is set by the resistance the output is taken across; a current divider's is set by the resistance the current does not go through. The dual of a voltmeter's finite resistance is an ammeter's non-zero one, and the threshold has the same shape with one word changed: one per cent at a meter resistance of R/99 where R is what the meter looks back into — and removing an ideal current source means OPENING it, so that R is the two branches in series, 11 kΩ here, not the 909 Ω of their parallel combination — a factor of twelve in the same construction on the same network.

networks · Divider

Named alongside it

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

Model rangeLoadingDesign tradeoffOutput impedanceThevenin equivalentMonte carloSeeded generatorComparatorComponent sensitivityComponent toleranceCurrent dividerDuality

All concepts