Designing Ideas

You can employ a pin-limited microcontroller to develop a suitable dc/dc-boost-voltage converter with the aid of a few discrete components. Tiny microcontroller hosts dual dc/dc-boost converters details a simple circuit where a microcontroller powered by an AAA cell generates a high enough voltage to backlight an LCD.

Small capacitor supports telecom power supply during brownouts shows how to keep telecom equipment operational during a short brownout. The circuit charges a relatively small capacitor to twice the supply voltage to achieve brownout ride-through.

Overlap—the short period during which a push-pull drive's two transistors are both simultaneously on—is a common problem with these drives in a center-tapped transformer's primary. Cross-coupled gates preventpush-pull-driver overlap uses cross-coupled gates to prevent one transistor from turning on before the other turns off.

Often, when you are designing with high-speed ECL (emitter-coupled logic), you have too little time between clock cycles to implement logic functions using gates between flip-flops. In these cases, you can derive equivalent-logic functions using the wired-OR and flip-flop complementary inverted outputs using the scheme presented in Save valuable picoseconds using ECL-wired OR.