A Tribute to Bob Pease Pease Porridge —1 (1990-1992) Wonderful World of W/F's. Wika peepee Werner he doce snanr Ye marriage! inguion Waid a Pyeeng Uesepe aici Stee asha maa Miata tat cage SV tokens achat ieee ere! ' Sademaeicemet al rest Aalst Caaeircny lr sete i ake alpen coc ‘oes ave the ep et you ga the Ronda orb tery abet ‘aeetegurncy. Hy ety thay. sd rl ial Sy ecient Eaten fom a alg Aad Seeking =I is voi Seen eaptcn itm nt took andy iSrheasdomarenA oe the ado bcty, OO ak Se cowihir ere SE poodle eve pt lel rad aire chee F FV ne Wp iat ya? 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Or win, some of he pecal ee tring rode 70 eae, Balu ‘pt taeda Like scraper one ‘elder TC on ard the up {0 WORSE el wed il ke that Weregethe 4701200 VOkHL VIF the 4703-— 100 VIE se thet gen — te 4705. IMF VF Once we nated the Vi oe i nt FV we ey. So we've gt the 4702 TUF nl the 4708 FOOLS F/V,neering world. all the trouble of writing about “Yinear” and ana- log circuits? Everybody knows that linear cireuits are dead, Nobody's buying or designing in lin ear circuits; they are all being re- placed by digital signal processors. Analog computers have been dead for years. Why bother? Well, these days, even though there are trends to perform a lot of fanetions with digital computations, people are finding that there are still ahuge number of things that cannot be done properly without analog circuits, IVs true that some of the trendy new radios, claim to use a lot of digital tech- niques, but even there, the receiv- ers and amplifiers, are analog. cir- BOBPEASE —cuits—even if the OBTAINEDA the receiver's fre- BSEEFROMMIF — queney appears to INIANDIS be digitally con- STAFFSCIENTIST trolled. AT NATIONA When people SEMICONDUC. are designing dig- ‘TORCOR?, ital computers, SANTACLARA, they need analog CALE. techniques 0 make good lay- outs for fast buses. They need power supplies— either linear ICs or switeli-mode cireuits (which use ana- Jog circuits internally), And, as for us analog designers, the old-timers and the rookie engineers—well— this column is intended as a soapbox for 86 Fete Tek © NTC |SePreeR 18 29 PEASE PORRIDGE WHAT'S ALL THIS ANALOG STUFF, ANYHOW? This is the first of a series of columns about analog and “linear circuits written by Bob Pease, Staff Scientist at National Semicon- ductor Corp, Santa Clara Calif. We think our readers will get a lot out of Bob's seemingly off-the-wall, yet insightful views of the eng hy? Why am I going to | me to talk about linear cireuits, and then forme to listen to your opinions and comments and questions Thave a lot of opinions, but I'm also very interested in what makes you tick, I may not be the smartest engineer in the whole analog jungle, bat I have sort of vofunteered to start writing this, and we'll see what jnappens—what interesting debates wwe get into. I have a bunch of opin- ions about ICs, data sheets, testing, computer simulation, education, troubleshooting, along with a whole slew of little topics. Inevery darned issue of Blectron- ic Design, I'l try to have some pro- voeative or insightful topic. Some will be pretty technical, others will bbe more philosophieal in nature, But ‘one thing's for sure, I'll try not to bore you. For example: What's all this heuristie stuff, anyhow? HEURISTICS? ‘The other day I was talking with a young college graduate from a pres- tigious Eastern engineering school He explained that his specialty was analog synthesis. I perked up my ears—I hadn’t heard much about that. Where could I read more about this? “Oh,” he said, “in some of the IEEE journals.” Hmm. He started to explain the approach, It's a heuristic approach, he said, Hmm. What's a heuristie? He said, “You don't know what a heuristic is? Really?” I ex- plained no, that we didn’t have any heuristies when I was in school (Note: Mr. Webster says that heu- ristie means “serving to guide, dis- cover, or reveal; specif.: valuable for stimulating or conducting empirical DESIGN research but unproved or incapable of proof—often used of arguments, methods, or construets that assume orpostulate what remains to be prov- ‘en or that leads @ person to find out for himself —from the Greek, heur- iskein, to discover, find,”}—Gee, that sounds like analysis or optimization to me—not synthesis. ‘The young man explained that when you make a lot of optimization experiments, heuristie refers to the starting place, the initial guess. Hmm. He said, “You feed in some requirements and some specifica- tions, and it optimizes the perfor- mance.” Hmm. Now, what circuit does it use? “Oh, it uses the eireuit that you giveit.” mm, Tue Key Question Tf you give ita cirenit that doesn't, work well enough, how doesit gener- ate acireuit that works better’ “Oh, it doesn’t.” I explained to this young. fellow, that in our whole product line, about 99% of the circuits are not optimized at all—at least not “opti- mized” in the sense he understands, If you really OPTIMIZED them, they would all be a little different: than they are now. But each one has a different circuit that is a revolu- tionaty—not just an evolutionary— change from any previous cireuit. So there may be places in our company where optimization is useful and a good idea, But I wish he wouldn't eall it “ana- log synthesis,” that seems to be a misnomer. The circuits around our area—the ones in the NSC Linear data books (and, [bet, in the PMZand Analog Devices data books, too), were not “synthesized” except by bright engineers who knew that the oldcircuits wouldn’t cut it, andanew circuit was needed. Good luck, young fellow! All for now. / Comments invited! / RAP/ Robert A. Pease / Engineer ADDRESS: Mail Stop 25008, ‘National Semiconductor P.O. Box 58090 Santa Clara, CA 95052-8090PEASE PORRIDGE WHAT'S ALL THIS NOISE STUFF, ANYHOW? (PART 1) cently I was invited to a meeting to see the results of ‘2 new high-performance, low-noise transistor project. Tlooked at the technieal report. The new transistors were indeed quieter than the oldones. In fact, they were2 to 4 orders of magnitude quieter han, he conventional ones. T was ious, What was the test meth- od?" Ob, here isthe test cirutt (sce the figure). Now, I asked, were the betas high or low! I was told they were pretty fow, but they can be brought up lat- cr. I explained that when the betas get low, if they're not very well matched, the test cireuit's outputean peg—right up to the + or - rail Then, of course, the apparent output noise gets rather small. (Ohhh!) When this cir- cuit is running okay, the current noise is amplified by a big resis- tance: 1 MO x (N+D, where N is the closed loop q gain, (Rp/R,). So, the output will in Wd clude: (I+ noise of BOB PEASE Qua) + (noise of OBTAINEDA Qs) 1000 Ma. BSEEFROMMIT However, the off- IN1961ANDIS__ set current (I+) — starrscievnst (I-) will also be ATNATIONAL magnified by 1000 SEMICONDUC. _M@. So even 9 nA TORCORP, of offset current SANTACLARA, will cause the op CALE amp's ontput to try to go to +9 V. Ifthe power supply won't let the out- put get to a fair balanee, the output will peg. Naturally the output be- comes very quiet—the circuit. has stopped amplifying the noise. Tako pointed out that ideally the cireuit could measure the base-cur rent noise of the transistor, or device under test (DUT). But the layout of the circuit is quite critical. Just 1 pF of capacitance (C5) from the output to the base of Qyp will cause a lag in the response: 1000 M0 x 1 p= Ims, othe noise will roll off above 160 Hz. ‘Youcan makea layout with less than 0.1pP, but you have to think aboutit and engineer, ‘When we checked the test box, it was laid out very neatly: The output wire was bused alongside the sum- ming-point (base of Qs) wire, and the bandwidth was indeed less than 100 Hz. Ina future column, Iwill talk about what picofarad looks like and the harm it can do to you. So, even if the output wasn't pegged and you looked for the noise at 1 or 10 kHz, this testcireuit would giveananswer that’s considerably quieter than the theoretical minimum for the transis tor. Now here's a good place for sanity check, It's not impossible to measure the noise of a transistor’s base eurrent, but you must have a suitable eireui I wrote a paper back in 1968, and as I look at it today, the only things that changed are the names of the op amps. You ean’t buy any of those old discrete-transistor, potted-module op amps any more, but the testing -But Gewnee Se Worse Resuirs AS LONG AS ELECT TRANSISTOR cuResMr wase TESTER = Vout = ZByse (Qin usa) xf0liMn ae (Zeon-Tedre) s1000H-0. GUS Vos wf000 az Vore xit¥0 MER ee ton teene BLE Yam op 2 0 FRE UT PAT VOLTAGE GOES possiacey WcASE THE ns Liny7d WIRES Make, ALL fi Fea RON TC Qefatbeitesiod| 141