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

Series — page 4

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 100 nF capacitor with 100 mΩ in series, written the other way round. computed by solving, not by drawing. At 100 kHz the series pair and the parallel pair are the same impedance to 8.7e-19 of itself — the arithmetic's floor, not a tolerance — with Rp = 2.533 kΩ against Rs = 0.100 Ω and Cp = 99.996 nF against Cs = 100 nF. Away from it they part company at a rate set by Q = 159.2: the substitution costs one per cent below 48.2 kHz and above 207 kHz, a band of 4.3 to one.

Series parallel

  1. 1 The same part written two ways
  2. 2 The match with no knob
  3. 3 The efficiency a fixed Q costs
3 essays · frequency One step response, computed twice: from the poles, and by walking the network forward. A damping ratio of 0.22, so the overshoot is 49.2%. The two curves are drawn on top of each other; the panel below is the difference between them, which is the trapezoidal rule's error at 500 steps and reaches 1.70e-3 V.

Step response

  1. 1 One step, computed twice
  2. 2 The ringing that belongs to the rule
  3. 3 The phase the rule loses
3 essays · transients A switched capacitor is a resistor below a ratio, not below a frequency. computed by solving, not by drawing. The exact response of a capacitor shuttled between the input and a holding capacitor at 1.00 MHz — a difference equation with one pole, evaluated on the unit circle — against the continuous R–C its equivalent resistance is supposed to make. The corner is 3.15 kHz against the model's 3.18 kHz, 0.99% out, and the discrepancy is set by the capacitor ratio alone: one per cent needs a ratio under 0.0201, which is a clock 315 times the corner. The second difference has no counterpart at all — the sampled response repeats at the clock, so the image rising on the right of this plot is signal at 997 kHz arriving as though it were at the corner. The third is settling: 1 pF charged through 1 kΩ gets 500.0 time constants a half period at this clock, and being short of full charge raises the equivalent resistance by 0.000%, which puts a ceiling on the clock at 108 MHz.

Switched capacitor

  1. 1 A resistor made of a clock
  2. 2 The filter that samples
  3. 3 The offset that knows the signal
3 essays · filters A series-terminated net holds half a swing for 1.0 delays at 50% along it. computed by solving, not by drawing. What a receiver 50% of the way along one net sees under three terminations, from a lattice evaluated at that point rather than at the ends. The shaded strip is the interval in which a logic input has no defined answer — between 30% and 70% of the swing. The series-terminated net sits in it for 4.83 ns, which is 2(1 − x) delays exactly and is zero only at the far end; the unterminated net sits in it for 4.83 ns and then overshoots by 82%; the parallel-terminated net never does, and draws 60 mA down the line for as long as the level is held.

Termination

  1. 1 The resistor at the wrong end
  2. 2 The receiver that is a branch
  3. 3 Terminated at both ends
3 essays · lines The neutral of a three-phase supply with one phase 30% off. computed by solving, not by drawing. Balanced, the three line currents sum to 4.6e-16 of one of them and the neutral carries nothing. With one phase 30% heavier the neutral carries 2.65 A against a line current of 11.50 A. The neutral reaches a tenth of a line current at 11.1% imbalance.

Three-phase

  1. 1 Three phases, and the wire that carries nothing
  2. 2 The neutral that carries more than a line
  3. 3 The half the neutral does not carry
3 essays · power The winding window solved in two dimensions, copper filling 100% of it. computed by solving, not by drawing. The grey frame is iron of infinite permeability, which in this formulation is a Neumann boundary — flux enters it at right angles and pays nothing. The thin curves are flux lines, which are contours of the vector potential, so equal spacing is equal flux. The copper is shaded by its own share of the loss. At 100 per cent fill the solved ratio is 16.280 against Dowell's 16.382, and the difference is entirely the flux that curls round the ends of the foils — which the one-dimensional model has no way to hold.

Winding field

  1. 1 The assumption that is a geometry
  2. 2 The turns nearest the gap
  3. 3 The wire that is not a foil
3 essays · magnetics What 10 ps of aperture jitter is worth, in bits. computed by solving, not by drawing. Samples are taken at instants displaced by a seeded Gaussian of 10 ps and the error is measured against the same sinusoid sampled exactly. The line is −20 log(2π f × jitter), which the measurement matches to 0.12 dB across three decades. The penalty is exactly twenty decibels a decade of input frequency, because the error is the signal's slope times the timing error and nothing else — so a converter holds 16 bits only up to 199 kHz and 12 bits up to 3.18 MHz. An aperture figure quoted without an input frequency states no resolution at all.

Aperture jitter

  1. 1 A picosecond, read as bits
  2. 2 A floor, or a line
2 essays · digital A cascode multiplies rₒ by β, not by gₘrₒ — and the two are 21× apart. computed by solving, not by drawing. The output resistance of a cascode stage, measured by driving the output node with a current source and reading the voltage, against the current gain of the upper device. The plain stage's is 80 kΩ — rₒ and nothing else. The cascode's is 11.5 MΩ at β = 150, which is βrₒ to within a tenth and is 21 times below the gₘrₒ² every reference gives. The reason is in the netlist rather than in the algebra: the upper device's base draws current, so its rπ sits from the lower device's collector to signal ground and shunts the node the feedback works through. What the arrangement buys therefore scales with β and stops when β does, and the curve is the two expressions drawn against the measurement.

Cascode

  1. 1 The device that never sees the swing
  2. 2 The source that holds to the supply
2 essays · semiconductors One part, two corners: 3.98 kHz to the common mode and 7.86 MHz to the signal. computed by solving, not by drawing. Two windings on one core with a coupling of 0.999, driven twice from the same netlist — once with the two conductors in opposition, which is the signal, and once with them in parallel, which is everything the cable picked up. The mode that goes the same way round both windings meets (1+k)L and is down three decibels by 3.98 kHz; the mode that goes opposite ways meets the leakage, (1−k)L, and is untouched until 7.86 MHz. The ratio is 1975, which is 2/(1−k) and contains no inductance at all. Neither number is computed here: both modes are driven and the answer is read.

Common-mode choke

  1. 1 The inductor one mode cannot see
  2. 2 The depth a resonance does not have
2 essays · lines Two tracks, and a far end that cancels exactly when the field is all in one material. computed by solving, not by drawing, on 12 coupled sections of a 100 mm pair terminated in 50 Ω at all four ends. A mutual capacitance injects a current proportional to dV/dt and splits it towards both ends of the quiet track; a mutual inductance injects a voltage proportional to dI/dt and drives the two ends in opposite directions. So the near end goes as Cm/Ct + Lm/Lt and the far end as their difference, with the same constant in front of both — measured here as 1.048e-2 either way, over a slider that moves the ratio by five times. The consequence is that the far end is not a smaller effect but a cancellation: at a ratio of one it is 7.52e-19 of the drive, which is zero to the last bits of a double, while the near end is 1.048e-3. That is why a stripline has no far-end crosstalk and a microstrip has some — what shows up there measures the field that is in air, not the spacing. The model is lumped and stops where it says: a section is one degree long at 50.0 MHz.

Crosstalk

  1. 1 The far end that cancels
  2. 2 How wide a null is
2 essays · lines The charge that comes back: a 0.2% dielectric, 10 s shorted, read at 900 s. computed by solving, not by drawing. The capacitor is charged to 10 V until every relaxation is complete, shorted for 10 seconds, then opened and watched. It climbs back to 20.00 millivolts — 0.2000 per cent of where it was — and the shape is the finding: it is a straight line on a logarithmic time axis, gaining 0.097 per cent of the charging voltage per decade. There is no time constant after which it is over, because there is no single time constant: one branch of the model comes to equilibrium per decade, for as many decades as the dielectric has. A decade before the reading it was at 0.1033 per cent.

Dielectric absorption

  1. 1 The capacitor that remembers
  2. 2 Ten seconds, and fifteen minutes
2 essays · transients One exponential and one pair, both driven 20.0 mV. computed by solving, not by drawing. The pair's characteristic is odd, so its even harmonics vanish: the second comes out at 1.5e-16 of the fundamental against 18.88% for the single stage. It is not a small residue but the floor of the arithmetic. The price is the third harmonic, 1.202% against 2.404%, and total distortion of 1.202% against 19.03%.

Differential pair

  1. 2 What a pair cancels, and what it only halves
  2. 3 What matching does about temperature
2 essays · semiconductors Below 910 kHz a trace is a diffusion, not a line — and its velocity goes as √f. computed by solving, not by drawing. The phase velocity of an ordinary FR-4 trace against frequency, computed from γ = √((R + jωL)(G + jωC)) with a series resistance that rises as √f above its skin-effect corner and a shunt conductance proportional to frequency. Above 910 kHz the velocity is 0.4767c and does not move, which is the number every other essay in this field uses. Below it the series resistance dominates the reactance, the line is a diffusion, and the velocity falls as the square root of frequency — measured at the 0.467 power. The characteristic impedance is not a constant down there either: 1508 Ω at a kilohertz against 50.0 Ω at ten gigahertz.

Dispersion

  1. 1 The delay that is not one number
  2. 2 The permittivity a loss forbids
2 essays · lines 20 inductor-capacitor sections, against the line they are meant to be. computed by solving, not by drawing by the trapezoidal rule over 2,600 steps. The LC ladder reaches two per cent of full scale at 0.86 delays, before the wave picture says anything can have arrived, and its plateaus are wrong by up to 0.079 V. Neither is a small correction to the wave answer; they are what a network of 20 poles does when asked to be a delay.

Distributed vs lumped

  1. 2 A ladder is not a line
  2. 3 The sections a wavelength needs
2 essays · lines A 1.0% doublet: 0.078 dB in the magnitude, 36× the settling time. computed by solving, not by drawing. Above, the magnitude of a fast circuit followed by a pole and a zero that were meant to cancel and miss by 1.00%, against the same circuit with the cancellation exact: the worst disagreement anywhere up to the fast corner is 0.0777 dB. Below, the error left in the step response, in units of the tail's own amplitude of 0.909%. Settling to 0.10% takes 245.2 fast time constants against 6.9 with the cancellation exact, and the closed form τ·ln(A/B) gives 245.2 — a time that contains nothing of the fast circuit at all.

Doublet

  1. 1 The cancellation that leaves a tail
  2. 2 The slowest one decides it
2 essays · transients The usable range of one stage, in a 10 kHz measurement. computed by solving, not by drawing. The floor is the Johnson noise of a 1 kΩ source in the measurement's own noise bandwidth — 501.6 nV, using 15.7 kHz rather than the 10 kHz corner. The ceiling is the drive at which an exponential's distortion reaches one per cent, 1.03 mV. Between them is 66.3 dB, and nothing a designer does moves either number without changing the circuit.

Dynamic range

  1. 3 A floor and a ceiling
  2. 4 The ceiling is not at the output
2 essays · noise The equivalent of six elements, and the heat it does not account for. computed by solving, not by drawing at 73 loads. The network reduces to 8.56032 V behind 599.768 Ω, obtained twice and agreeing to twelve figures. Into every load on the axis the two put the same voltage to 2.2e-16 of it and deliver the same power to 7.8e-16 — there is no load that can tell them apart. Inside, at a load of 5.62 kΩ, the real network is dissipating 49.168 mW and the equivalent claims 1.1349 mW, a factor of 43.3. With the port open the equivalent says nothing at all is being burned and the network is burning 48.03 mW. The slider moves the resistor bridging the two sources, which joins two ideal sources and so cannot change anything the port can reach: the equivalent stays 8.56032 V behind 599.768 Ω to the last bit at every setting, while the heat inside moves by two and a half times.

Equivalent circuit

  1. 1 Exact outside and wrong within
  2. 2 The resistor that is not made of the resistors
2 essays · networks Three filter families at order 5, all with the same half-power point. At three times the corner the Chebyshev is -64.0 dB down, the Butterworth -47.7 dB and the Bessel -28.3 dB. The inset is the passband at forty times the vertical magnification, which is the only place the Chebyshev's half-decibel of ripple is visible at all.

Filter families

  1. 1 Three families, one corner
  2. 2 The zeros that buy an order
2 essays · filters An order-5 ladder driven from 2× the resistance it was designed between. computed by solving, not by drawing. A doubly-terminated Butterworth ladder is a two-port designed between two stated resistances, and the resistances are part of the design rather than the environment it happens to be used in. At match it loses 6.021 dB — exactly half the voltage — and its passband has no peak anywhere in it. Driving the same five reactances from 2× that resistance moves the shape by 2.345 dB and the insertion loss to 9.542 dB. The band inside which the shape is right to 0.5 dB runs 0.8857× to 1.1371× — a window of 25 per cent on a quantity usually written down as a round number. And the two sides are not alike: at twenty times the design resistance the departure has settled at 5.33 dB, while at a twentieth of it the passband is 15.51 dB out with 7.21 dB of peaking on it, so driving a ladder from too low an impedance is worse than driving it from too high a one.

Filter termination

  1. 1 The two resistors a ladder was designed between
  2. 2 The termination an even order cannot have
2 essays · filters A single-pole low-pass with its corner at 995 Hz. Solved at 209 frequencies. The straight-line sketch, drawn faintly, is 3.01 dB wrong at the corner and within a tenth of a decibel only below 152 Hz. The phase is already −5.7° a decade before the corner and −84° a decade after it.

Frequency response

  1. 1 One solve, read four ways
  2. 2 Four readings of one distance
2 essays · frequency

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