Thursday, March 13, 2014

In Real Life: NE555 Outputs

I was working on simple flyback driver for my HV DC supply and realized that I need some kind of a MOSFET driver. I used the excellent TC4429 in the past, but the x5 relative cost of it compared to NE555 makes me wonder if the famous chip is reliable enough to do the same task.

In this post, I test the effect of decoupling cap on supply and control voltage pins, and the effect of tied pin3 and pin7, the phase difference of both output, and the speed of internal comparator and reset pin.

So, this is my attempt of probing the pin3 output waveform, using 12V SLA and DS1102E. :)

To test the chip, I configured it as simple one-stage ring oscillator.

The first test, the supply voltage decoupling capacitor.

This is the barebone circuit. The simplicity of the circuit proved on breadboard.