Julian Treasure, in his work on “Sound Affects” states, “Almost every sound we hear comprises rich harmonics---overtones that we may not notice, but that are essential in producing the timbre and the...

Not necessarily; op amps typically specify 30 or more individual parameters. The task you're trying to accomplish will dictate which of these specifications are most important to you (and your circuit...

Audio metering is present in almost any equipment that plays or records audio from cell phones displaying bar graphs of audio output levels, to home stereos with flashing LEDS, to live broadcasting.Th...

The digital gain feature in modern high-speed ADCs is simply a multiplication of the captured digital signal by a constant. If a 2 Vpp analog signal fills the full digital range and the constant multi...

I recently wrote about my ongoing search for the perfect truly mobile audio-reproduction experience, and afterward one of you was kind enough to send me a set of NC-255 active-noise-reduction headphon...

Certainly! Crosstalk can come about in several ways: from one signal chain on a printed circuit board (PCB) to another, from one channel within an IC to another, or through the power supply. The key t...

Julian Treasure, in his work on “Sound Affects” states, “Almost every sound we hear comprises rich harmonics---overtones that we may not notice, but that are essential in producing the timbre and the...

Building on last month’s discussion of resistor noise, let’s check out some basics of amplifier noise. The non-inverting op amp configuration is most common for low noise applications so we’ll make th...

Using standard resistor values can greatly impact the accuracy and predictability of a circuit by eliminating rounding errors incurred at the end of the design. Selecting resistor values traditionally...

Let’s say that for a project you are working on, you need an op amp (of course, I would like it to be one of one of Touchstone’s op amps), and you want to make sure that the amplifier meets your requi...

The Fourier Transform is one of deepest insights ever made. Unfortunately, the meaning is buried within dense equations: Yikes. Rather than deciphering it symbol-by-symbol, let's experience the idea (...

Created using Processing, ModelBuilder Library by Marius Watz and a 3D printer, Amanda Ghassaei at instructables managed to print a 33rpm music record that actually doesn’t sound too bad considering t...

To understand how common-mode signals are created and then suppressed, you should first understand the interaction of shields and grounds in common cable configurations. The following discussion def...

Isolation is needed now more than ever with applications like LED lighting, brushless motors, power monitoring, and many others that are a combination of direct offline power electronics with isolated...

I design audio circuits. My mentor taught me to avoid ground loops at all costs, yet in digital products I see a solid ground plane holding hundreds of circuits. Between boards, I see a web of ground-...

Most of the time it is necessary to simulate circuits on computers to predict with sufficient accuracy what their behavior will be when implemented. However, a good circuit designer wants to have some...

I immediately assumed that there was an incorrect component value installed on the board, so I measured the two resistors making up a voltage-divider. They were just fine. I desoldered the capacitor f...

There are a plethora of technical articles showing designers how to develop good circuits and systems reliably, but there exist very few that outline the possible pitfalls, difficult design compromise...

In the world of industrial controls only a few things are certain; the next product will have a smaller form factor, more channels and have a lower target cost per channel. The expectation is that tec...

If we ask the various manufacturers how good are their analog parts, they will undoubtedly reply, "quite good." Indeed, the circuits usually are quite amazing when we consider the environment inside t...

Last month (see Part 1) we discussed how a modern, benchtop DVM could be used as a low-frequency waveform analyzer with sampling rates of over 1000 readings/second. This month we take a look at verify...

The noise performance of amplifier circuits is greatly affected by the Johnson noise of resistors—the source resistance and feedback resistors. Most everyone seems to know that resistors have noise bu...

Tunç Doluca, President and CEO, Maxim Integrated Products, Inc., gave a background of his company’s beginnings.  Since its inception in 1983, Maxim Integrated Products has produced great analog buil...

When it comes to monolithic instrumentation amplifiers (INAs), there are a variety of methods that manufacturers use in order to implement the gain setting. These methods include fixed gain, programma...

Microelectromechanical system (MEMS) microphones offer plenty of advantages typical of MEMS devices, including tiny size, low power usage, and consistent performance over time and temperature. But the...

The noise contribution of folded cascodes is a major consideration for the newly introduced amplifier topology. In this appendix I will thus present a brief analysis of the major noise sources in fo...

In the final part of his series on a new ultra-linear audio output stage driver, Kendall Castor-Perry presents simulations of its static and dynamic linearity performance, demonstrating the inherent m...

Modern sensors detect a multitude of real-world analog attributes—temperature, force, pressure, humidity, flow, and power, just for starters. In turn, they typically output some level of voltage, curr...

According to Goethe, "An unused life is an early death."1 Similarly, an unused pin on an analog IC may greatly increase the risk of its early death by electrostatic discharge (ESD). Although unused ou...