cool column

And I wonder why John Larkin thinks that he could recognise it if it did.

He couldn't recognise the emitter-coupled monostable as a monostable when I posted a the Spice model of the circuit here a while back.

It won't act as a monostable if the edge speed of the trigger edge is too slow, but that doesn't stop it being a useful circuit in a lot of applications.

I'm surprised that you would want to remind everyone what a horrible circuit that was.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Electronic design, as practiced with the current available technology, is probably not complex enough to make AI worth the trouble. In the every case involving considerable complexity, like drug discovery and proteomics ( and various other forms of -omics ), the set of tentative AI findings/ solutions are always put through a reality check performed by human expertise. And then only a handful out of possibly tens of thousands are approved for further development. For electronics, you would just have the subject matter experts do the design from scratch to get to the same endpoint. AI trained on every electronics application note and circuit ever published might be an advantage if it doesn't overwhelm the designers with the TL;DR effect. But any product that pretends to deliver results for people who otherwise don't know what they're doing probably won't be trustworthy for a very long time. Afterall, the technology is working with the standard of more likely right than wrong.

If you were any good at electronic circuit design, you'd be aware that it is an absolutely classic discrete transistor design.

Ghiggino, K.P., Phillips, D., and Sloman, A.W. "Nanosecond pulse stretcher",Journal of Physics E: Scientific Instruments, 12, 686-687 (1979).

mentions it as an alternative the collector-coupled monostable that I actually used (which worked fine in my specific application but had a rate dependent thermal offset which I wasn't happy with).

Jim Thompson would have recognised it immediately.

It seems to have been published in Millman J. and Taub H. "Pulse, Digital and Switching Waveforms" McGraw Hill New York 1965 Chapter 11.

I've never read that particular textbook, but the engineers I worked with back in the 1970's seemed to think highly of it.

The devil is in the details.

Post it again and we can discuss it.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

On 4/03/2026 6:13 am, john larkin wrote:

Which you clearly didn't understand at the time. and presumably still don't.

I'll do it, but you have obviously got no interest in any kind of discussion that doesn't feed your ego.

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Tietze & Schenk discusses the circuit and many more. They even discussed the 555 topology before it was put into an IC, apparently originating with Monolithic Memory IIRC. They don't discuss rate-dependent thermal offset, and neither does Millman. The German HP references it in at least one app note. It's old, so you should be able to find an edition on the cheap if not free. Continues to be an excellent compendium.

It's not intelligence it's just a language model. What it does is pattern copying, It's enough to fool many people that it is competent. salespeople seem to like it, but it seems like every other expert says that it's not good at their job.

Anthropic recently completed what looks like a good data-driven survey of labor market impacts of AI. EE is not on the list. Computer programmers are going to be hit hard, probably the "scripters."