Design Project: Simple Component Curve-Tracer Circuit
Discrete Semiconductor Devices and Circuits
Question 1
Question 2
Question 3
Question 4
When testing this circuit for the first time, the student connects a 1 kΩ resistor to the two test leads and gets this result from the oscilloscope display:
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The student was actually expecting something that looked like this:
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Upon inspection, nothing appears to be wrong with the wiring of the curve tracer circuit. Explain what the problem is so the student is able to achieve the expected results.
Question 5
Explain why the wave-shape of the excitation voltage is irrelevant to the operation of this curve tracing circuit. The transformer happens to output the same sine wave shape exhibited by the AC line power, but the circuit would work equally wall with a triangle wave, sawtooth wave, or badly distorted sine wave.
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