Obscure Electronics Topics

Doesn't an obscure topic becomes less obscure when people read about it?

Recently huh?....

Most obscure....

I learned Digikey doesn't have 1206 size center tapped SMD inductors. :)

D from BC

I would *love* to find a source of tapped SMD inductors! Any suggestions?

that would be dark noise in detectors, without doubt. albeit Van der Ziel was on the subject target long time ago.

JureZ.

I haven't looked very much...but suspect it's a nonexistent animal. I have to add one more detail... That would be a tapped SMD chip inductor sharing the same core.. It's like a chip autotransformer. Not 2 individual inductors in series.

D from BC

!Absolutely!

Photomultiplier non-linearity.

Sloman, A.W. "Comment on 'Computer aided simulation study of photomultiplier tubes'", IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices, ED-38

I was commenting on a paper by Zaghloul and Ree - professor and graduate student - who claimed that nothing had been published on the subject. I cited five papers and an application note, and pointed out that a couple of the papers I'd cited did include fairly comprehensive reviews of what literature there is.

The 1978 paper I cited, by Aspnes and Studna, had made the same claim, but Rev.Sci Instrum refused to publish my comment addressing that point, amongst others.

I got started on the subject when Lush publishe his paper in 1965, so I'm falling short on the recently, but I expect to stay way ahead on obscurity.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

You could ignore some pins on this guy:-

or equivalent..

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Right, select as suitable smt transformer. Lots of good choices. Maybe one from MiniCircuits.

You can get gain from a non-tunnel diode.

Electrolytic devices, electronic things that use ionic conduction in liquids. Apart from the obvious, I can think of six or eight more of various levels of obscurity.

But recently? Double-edge-clocked flops in Xilinx FPGAs, wave digital filters, running DDS synthesizers backwards, running SRDs in series, various bizarre aircraft serial busses, mach sensors and airplane crashes, Legendre filters.

John

Parametric amplifier? That's pretty obscure nowadays. I bet there's a way to modulate the DC bias on a hf rectifier and get gain that way, too.

You can get gain from a capacitor, too.

John

I'd rather say I my obscurity was enlightened by the brilliant ideas:

IIR filters with perfectly linear phase, random sampling as long as Nyquist condition is satisfied at the average, FDLS, thermal noise in capacitors, compensation of hard nonlinearities in control loops,

Vladimir Vassilevsky DSP and Mixed Signal Design Consultant

Gunn and avalanche effects are available also.

You mean the RC circuit with gain or voltage dependent capacitance?

Vladimir Vassilevsky DSP and Mixed Signal Design Consultant

Not really obscure but interesting nevertheless.

OOPS

Regards,

Boris Mohar

Got Knock? - see: Viatrack Printed Circuit Designs (among other things)

void _-void-_ in the obvious place

Hey! A house that Slowman can afford ;-)

...Jim Thompson

I wonder if an SRD can produce power gain. Sure seems like it could. Milliwatts of forward bias could modulate kilowatts of reverse spike. It's not hard to have the recovered reverse charge be half of the forward bias charge, but the voltage ratio could be 100:1 or so.

Or the obvious case, a PIN diode RF gate.

But baseband, carrier-free, quasi-linear gain? That escapes me.

The latter, as a parametric amp with power gain. I've seen people do kilovolt-level nonlinear transmission lines (shock lines) based on capacitor nonlinearity too.

John