Science/Engineering/Technical forums

These converted what was magic into sufficiently advanced technology for me, back in the day, and I just rediscovered them online.
A link: http://www.ti.com/lit/an/snoa737/snoa737.pdf
And what's at the link, just in case, for posterity.

App note #A from National! Now that's going back almost to Philbrick.

And here's the best Phase Locked loop writeup I've ever seen:
http://www.ti.com/lit/an/snoa651/snoa651.pdf
And locally:


These really turned some lights on for me when I was a young punk in '78. Why does lower transconductance in the input stage make an opamp slew faster??!?!

What's the difference between tracking and capture range in a PLL - why is there one, and how does loop bandwidth affect tracking into the noise as a tradeoff with ability to capture in the first place? How to actually calculate feedforward how your loop is gonna perform, using real units.

This one seems to be a nice clean tutorial on PLL's.

PLL Performance Simulation and Design Handbook
http://www.ti.com/tool/pll_book

There's clickable link on that page to get the pdf.

And on Op Amps, this book goes back to some of the early designers.

Intuitive IC Op Amps from Basics to Useful Applications
Thomas M. Frederiksen

Published by National Semiconductor

One seller link as of today:
https://www.amazon.com/Intuitive-Amps-B ... 9997796675

Hi Rex, thanks for the post, it's kinda lonely around here of late...

I've been finding these older sources valuable right along, and not just in electronics. A lot of my initial learning on fusor stuff was from Rev Sci Instruments, but from the 40's though maybe the '60s.

When a thing is new, the people involved are excited and want to show the world all about the cool new toy. Once it's half mature, it seems grad students are the only writers, and their motivation is to convince a thesis adviser they have command of the jargon that keeps the unwashed out - a whole different class of priority, and you can't learn anything from that.

In the case of the National stuff...those guys and a few others were who really taught me electronics after my Dad got me into it as a child. Robert Dobkins, Bob Pease, Jim Williams (Motorola at the time) and a few others I've left out were my heros.

As luck would have it, due to inheriting some racks of GAP (Philbrick) opamp gear, I wound up getting in touch with Joe Sousa, a great engineer himself then at LTC, who introduced me to my old heros, since they then all worked there (many no longer living, sigh). I had some real good dox and personal communications between my Dad and George and shared them and some data sheets for Joe's Philbrick archive (which is worth checking out). We did leave out the paper on how to simulate the delayed neutrons from fission, as that would actually have broadcast some things that are still secret and necessary for reactor and bomb design...but back in the day, publishing in a journal like that (like a math journal today) is just as secret as a vault...

Did you mean 'stimulate'? I hope the NDA is growing weaker...

No, simulate on an analog computer which was the original use of op amps (the early ones I have are tube-type).
You need to know that stuff to make a reactor that doesn't melt or a bomb that doesn't fizzle.
So -> even if it wasn't secret then <- we decided not to spread the info around, as it's kind nasty to find out the hard way.
And finding out the hard way has a tendency to reveal and foil any nefarious plans - as it should be.

But that's just my opinion. Maybe it's good to have people melt reactors and have their nukes fail to work right - even though it makes them dirtier (in truth, there's another secret which is why most state actors fail at first, and I'm not sayin' - it's real not-obvious).

Funny what you run across when intensively researching stuff for fusion. So much old fission info around, and not all well controlled.

There's no NDA expiration on that stuff - just yours. It's muerte code.

Yep. I know a little about initiators, but I don't tell as well.