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

Series — page 2

A field says what an essay is about. A series follows one idea essay by essay — from the question that introduces it to the one that assumes all the others.
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%.

Bridge

  1. 1 The bridge that is linear near one point
  2. 2 The leads that are in the bridge
  3. 3 The two leads nobody counts
  4. 4 The carrier a cable allows
4 essays · applied The millivolts in the wire, which are nobody's signal. computed by solving, not by drawing at 145 frequencies. A 10 mm run of one-ounce copper carries the return of a 100 mA load and the reference of a 10 mV sensor. Its 5.00 mΩ and 10.0 nH put 500.0 µV in series with the sensor at low frequency — 5.00% of the reading — rising a decade per decade above 79.6 kHz until at 1.59 MHz the error is the whole signal. The full solve and the interfering current times the shared impedance agree to 4.4e-7. The slider is the length of the shared run: both the resistance and the inductance are proportional to it, so every point on the curve moves down together and the corner stays at 79.6 kHz.

Common-impedance

  1. 1 The millivolts in the wire
  2. 2 Every tooth the same height
  3. 3 One voltage added to two readings
  4. 4 A star is half a millimetre long
4 essays · instruments A copy out by 1.3% for the reason everybody names, and 11% for the one nobody does. computed by solving, not by drawing at 60 output voltages, with the Early conductance iterated to self-consistency against the current that sets it. Two base currents are stolen from the reference, so the copy is β/(β+2) of it — 1.32% low at β = 150 — and that is exact at exactly one output voltage, 0.7043 V, which is 9.39 mV under the reference's own base-emitter voltage of 0.7137 V — a displacement that goes as 1/(β+2), so that the product of the two is 1.427 V at every β the slider offers. Everywhere else the Early effect is larger: the current rises at 1.21% per volt, so moving the output from one volt to ten changes it by 11.2%. One per cent holds over 0.810 V, which is the Early voltage over a hundred and contains neither the current nor any resistor. The slider is β: it moves the first error by fifty times and the second by nothing at all.

Current mirror

  1. 1 The copy, and its two errors
  2. 2 The error that is a distribution
  3. 3 The refusal, and what it was protecting
  4. 4 The mismatch that cancels itself
4 essays · semiconductors An exponential with 6× of degeneration: both edges move, and not together. computed by solving, not by drawing at 61 amplitudes. Total harmonic distortion reaches one per cent at 36.6 mV and the gain falls one per cent short of its small-signal value at 85.0 mV. An emitter resistor dividing the gain by 6 moves the distortion edge by 35.4 times — the square of the factor, because the resistor both divides the drive reaching the junction and linearises what the junction does with it — while the gain edge moves by only 11.6 times. So the two edges close up: 2.32 times apart here against 7.06 bare, and a well-degenerated stage stops being limited by its linearity and starts being limited by how accurately its gain is known.

Emitter degeneration

  1. 1 What a resistor in the emitter buys
  2. 2 Where the two exponents come from
  3. 3 What the fourth order says about the third
  4. 4 The order that stops helping
4 essays · semiconductors A follower's output impedance from 1 kΩ of source, bare and with 100 pF on it. computed by solving, not by drawing, on a small-signal follower at 2.0 mA with β = 150 and fT = 560 MHz. At 100 Hz the emitter presents 19.08 Ω against a textbook 1/gₘ + Rₛ/(β+1) of 19.55 Ω — the expression is an upper bound here and at every source resistance on the slider, 2.4% high at this one. What it cannot describe is the frequency axis: the β that divided the source resistance down is itself falling, so the impedance rises, and the reactance at 3 MHz is 4.3 Ω — an inductance of 0.229 µH against Rₛ/ωT = 0.284 µH. With 100 pF hung on the output that impedance peaks at 67.0 Ω at 29.3 MHz, 3.51 times its own low-frequency value: an inductive source and a capacitive load are a resonant circuit, and this one is inside a part whose output impedance is quoted as a single number.

Emitter follower

  1. 1 The buffer that is not a buffer
  2. 2 The input that pushes back
  3. 3 The resistance that is below zero
  4. 4 What the cure at the base costs
4 essays · semiconductors 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.

Gyrator

  1. 1 The inductor that is an amplifier
  2. 2 One inductor, and ten components
  3. 3 Eight amplifiers, and what they add
  4. 4 The boundary that improves when the part gets worse
4 essays · filters One Sallen-Key design at 10 kΩ, and the band of impedance levels it survives. computed by solving, not by drawing. A 10.0 kHz unity-gain Sallen-Key section realised at seven impedance levels three decades apart, with every resistance multiplied and every capacitance divided by the same factor. The design is exactly invariant: the solved magnitudes agree to 1.0e-15 of each other across all seven and every frequency in the passband, which is the last bits of a double rather than a good approximation. The realisation is not, because two of its quantities do not scale — 50 Ω of amplifier output resistance and 2 pF of stray capacitance to everywhere — and they bind at opposite ends. Inside 0.1 dB the band runs 31.6 Ω to 31.6 kΩ, with the least departure of 0.0133 dB at 1000 Ω; at this setting it is 0.036 dB at 20.0 kHz. The consideration that does not appear on either axis is noise: the resistors' density goes as √R, so across the six decades drawn the noise moves by 1000 times and points at the low end of the band.

Impedance scaling

  1. 1 The same filter a thousand times larger
  2. 2 The band that closes with the order
  3. 3 The band that does not close
  4. 4 The floor that outlives the arithmetic
4 essays · filters Five resistances, five corner frequencies, and one total on the capacitor. computed by solving, not by drawing. The noise density at a 1 pF capacitor charged through 100 Ω, 1 kΩ, 10 kΩ, 100 kΩ and 1 MΩ, at 290 K. The densities are 100 times apart and the noise bandwidths 1.0e+4 times apart, in opposite directions, so the area under every curve is the same: 63.2762 µV against 63.2762 µV, and √(kT/C) is 63.2762 µV. The resistance has cancelled out of the answer, and the reason is that ½C⟨v²⟩ is the ½kT a degree of freedom in contact with a bath holds — which no arrangement of resistors can change. The claim is about the whole frequency axis and nothing less: inside a 15.9 MHz band the same five networks give 5.05 µV to 63.07 µV, a factor of 12.5.

Kt over c

  1. 1 The total that has no resistor in it
  2. 2 The noise a clock does not make
  3. 3 The amplifier inside the sample
  4. 4 The sample that is subtracted
4 essays · noise One bit, oversampled — and where the quantisation noise went. computed by solving, not by drawing. A first-order modulator is marched forward one sample at a time with a one-bit quantiser inside the loop, and the noise inside the band is read out of the transform of the error. It falls by 8.99 dB for every doubling of the oversampling ratio — measured 9.33, 10.12, 6.96, 9.54 — against 3.01 dB for plain oversampling, which is drawn beside it from the same starting point. The loop does not make less noise; it moves the noise out of the band, and at a ratio of 128 one bit is worth 9.18.

Noise shaping

  1. 1 One bit, and where the noise went
  2. 2 The loop that is worse at full scale
  3. 3 Two loops, and the mismatch between them
  4. 4 A floor, or five tones
4 essays · digital Where a converter stops measuring the signal and starts measuring the resistor. computed by solving, not by drawing. The quantisation floor is q/√12 and halves with every bit; the Johnson floor of a 1 kΩ source in 100 kHz is 1.266 µV and does not move. They cross at 18.80 bits. Below that the converter is the limit; above it the resistor is, and a further bit buys a more precise measurement of thermal noise. A resolution quoted without a source impedance and a bandwidth is not a resolution — which is the same sentence the instruments field makes about a probe.

Quantisation

  1. 1 The floor a converter sets
  2. 2 Six decibels a bit, and the half step blamed on it
  3. 3 When a floor stops being a floor
  4. 4 The dither that is a decision
4 essays · digital A 100 nF capacitor, and what it is above 14.5 MHz. The dashed line is 1/(ωC), which is what the symbol means. The solid line is the same part with 30 mΩ of series resistance and 1.2 nH of series inductance, solved. They part company at 4.69 MHz and by a decade above resonance the part's impedance is 99.0× what its capacitance predicts.

Real capacitor

  1. 2 The capacitor that is an inductor
  2. 3 The capacitance that is not one number
  3. 4 The coefficient that is about one reading
  4. 5 The reading a data sheet does not take
4 essays · frequency The droop a zero-order hold imposes at 48 kHz. computed by solving, not by drawing. Holding each sample for a clock period convolves the output with a rectangle, so the spectrum is multiplied by a sinc: -0.143 dB down at a tenth of the sample rate, -0.912 at a quarter and -3.922 at half — which is exactly 20 log(2/π) and contains no design decision at all. The dots are the amplitude of the fundamental read out of the transform of the staircase itself, agreeing with the closed form to 0.008%. There is also half a sample of delay, 10.417 µs here, which is the reason a held reconstruction is not a droopy copy of the signal but a droopy copy that has moved.

Reconstruction

  1. 1 The staircase on the way out
  2. 2 The nulls are where nothing is
  3. 3 Flatness, and the two currencies it is bought in
  4. 4 One knob, and the two exponents it turns
4 essays · digital A 1 V step onto 1.00 m of 50 Ω line into an open circuit. computed by solving, not by drawing as a sum of 81 arrivals. The source drives 0.8333 V into the line immediately — set by 10 Ω against the line's 50 Ω, and not by the load, which it cannot yet know about. One delay of 4.83 ns later the far end reaches 1.6666 V. The staircase settles at 0.999990 V, which is what the resistive divider gives.

Reflections

  1. 1 The staircase in time
  2. 2 The dip whose area is fixed
  3. 3 The via two lines can weigh
  4. 4 The via that is a piece of line
4 essays · lines The return under 10.0 cm of track, 200 µm above the plane. computed by solving, not by drawing, as an estimate from the geometry: a low-frequency path assumed to be three track-widths wide, 83.3 mΩ, and the parallel-plate inductance µ₀h/w, 125.7 nH, which is the limit for a track much wider than its height. The estimated resistance and reactance are equal at 106 kHz. Solved across the plane instead of assumed, the return does not change path at one frequency: it gathers beneath the track across a band about three decades wide, and this corner falls inside that band. Above the band the loop is the track's length times its height, 20.0 mm², and a milliamp round it at 100 MHz radiates -1.1 dBµV/m at three metres.

Return path

  1. 1 Where the current comes back
  2. 2 The corner that is three decades wide
  3. 3 Where the plane runs out
  4. 4 Two returns in one plane
4 essays · lines Two meters, one current, and neither of them measuring the heat. computed by solving, not by drawing, at 35 conduction angles. The first curve is an average-responding meter: it rectifies, averages and multiplies by 1.1107, which is exactly right for a sinusoid — -7.8e-5% here — and exactly 11.07% high on a square wave, because the error is the ratio of two form factors and contains neither the amplitude nor the frequency. On a rectifier drawing its 100 W in sixty degrees of conduction it is -35.90% low. The second curve is a true-RMS meter that reaches 9 harmonics, which has no shape assumption in it and a bandwidth instead: it returns the root-sum-square of the lines it can see, and is one per cent low below every angle here of conduction. The crest factor at sixty degrees is 1.733, which is inside every instrument's rating — neither meter is failing because the peak is large. One is failing because the shape is not a sinusoid and the other because the spectrum is wider than it is.

RMS and average

  1. 1 What a meter multiplies by
  2. 2 The average a square root pulls low
  3. 3 The noise a true-RMS meter reads low
  4. 4 The cycle a converter has to know
4 essays · power The voltage a winding may carry, which is a volt-second limit read at a frequency. computed by solving, not by drawing. The dots are bisections on a marched flux — the voltage integrated sample by sample until the peak excursion reaches 0.35 T — and the line is N·Ae·Bsat·2πf. They agree to 0.001% over three decades, and the fitted slope is 1.000000: exactly proportional, because flux is the integral of voltage and nothing else. The quantity that belongs to the core is the 3.500 mWb-turn, which has no frequency in it. A transformer "rated for 50 Hz" is a transformer whose volt-second product was divided by 2π × 50 once.

Saturation

  1. 1 A boundary in volt-seconds
  2. 2 The flux that walks
  3. 3 The inductance the current decides
  4. 4 The walk that stops
4 essays · magnetics Two floors on one axis, and the 50.0 mV between them. computed by solving, not by drawing. The flat line is the Johnson current noise of 1 kΩ, √(4kT/R), which has no current in it. The rising line is shot noise, √(2qI), which has no resistance in it. They cross at 50 µA — and the direct voltage across the resistance there is 49.981 mV, which is 2kT/q and contains neither quantity. The slider moves the resistance over six decades; the crossing moves with it and the voltage at the crossing does not move at all, to the last bit of a double.

Shot noise

  1. 1 The floor a current sets
  2. 2 The junction that is a resistor at zero volts
  3. 3 The resistor in the same loop
  4. 4 The two generators that are one current
4 essays · noise Linearising an exponential at 27 °C, and what it costs. The linear model understates the gain by 1% at 7.30 mV and by 10% at 22.8 mV. The thermal voltage at this temperature is 25.9 mV, so "small compared with Vₜ" is not the criterion — 28% of Vₜ is already 1% wrong.

Small-signal

  1. 2 How small is small signal
  2. 3 Where the mechanisms are one mechanism
  3. 4 Three amplitudes, all of them one per cent
  4. 5 Two boundaries removed, and one moved
4 essays · limits Superposition holds for the solution and not for its square. computed by solving, not by drawing, at 81 settings of the second source. Two ten-volt sources reach one hundred-ohm load through a hundred ohms each. Every node voltage and every branch current is the sum of the two single-source solves to 3.8e-16 of itself — superposition, exactly. The power is not: the difference is 2·Re(I₁·conj(I₂))·R to 1.0e-15, and at 0° between the sources and equal size it is 444.4 mW against the 222.2 mW that adding gives. Adding the two powers is within one per cent of the truth only when one source is below 0.00505 of the other. The slider is the angle between them: at 90° the two curves coincide to the last bit, and at 180° the true power falls to zero while the sum does not.

Superposition

  1. 1 Two solves that add, and the one that does not
  2. 2 The peak that only has a bound
  3. 3 The source that must not be zeroed
  4. 4 The cross terms that outnumber the sources
4 essays · networks A photodiode's own capacitance sets the bandwidth, as its -0.50 power. computed by solving, not by drawing. The bandwidth of a 1.0 MΩ transimpedance stage against the capacitance of the diode driving it, with the feedback capacitor at each point bisected to give exactly forty-five degrees of phase margin on the solved loop. The classical expression √(GBW/2π·rf·cd) is drawn over it: the right shape, and conservative by about a fifth at every capacitance. The bandwidth falls as the -0.497 power of the capacitance — a square-root law, so a diode of four times the area costs half the bandwidth rather than three quarters of it. At 30 pF the compensation is 0.598 pF against the expression's 0.725, and the bandwidth 295 kHz against 220.

Transimpedance

  1. 1 Where the trouble is at the input
  2. 2 The factor the expression leaves out
  3. 3 The error a bigger resistor cannot help
  4. 4 The tee that charges for its own compensation
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