Protecting Off-Amps

The best reason to be an applications engineer is the wide variety of customers, applications, circuits, and questions encountered, all of which provide daily opportunities to learn something new. Each year I receive several questions regarding the kind of performance users might expect from our amplifiers when their power supply is off. I like to refer to these amplifiers as "off-amps."

Adding Test Capability to a Window Comparator

It probably wasn't too long after comparators were invented that someone thought to put two of them together to make a window comparator. This article shows how to add an externally controlled test function to a window comparator in order to test whether the circuit is working properly or not.

Design, Simulate, and Document Proprietary Wireless Systems

The broad acceptance of standards developed for short range wireless connectivity has been one of the notable features of the semiconductor market in the past few years. These standards include Bluetooth, various flavors of Wi-Fi, ZigBee, and new emerging standards, such as Wibree/Bluetooth ULP and Ultra Wideband. The available wireless standards are not always the best fit for the application's requirements, however.