You know them, you love them, you take them for granted – they are single push button on/off switches. As [Dino] explains in the most recent episode of his Hack a Week series, they are typica… ...

For an ideal NPN transistor, the switch-on voltage at the base is typically 0.6V ... The thyristor will stay on until the power is turned off or the circuit is reset.

Wanting an auto-off circuit simple electronics, [Kyle] threw together this auto shutoff circuit. The basic idea behind the cirucuit is to use a microcontroller as a timer controlling two transistors.

Transistors, the tiny switches that flip on and off inside computer chips, have long been the domain of electricity. But scientists are beginning to develop chip components that run on light. Last ...

Nano-transistor switches with just one electron, ... In their "off" state, transistors block the flow of current, but when a small voltage is applied, they allow current to flow.

The circuit in the figure shows a low-cost solution based on a transistor switch (Q1). The transistor is off under normal conditions, when the differential amplifier built around U1 amplifies the ...

This made me look at the turn-off specs for the npn (a 2N2222A) and, for the first time I can remember, I noticed that the turn-off test circuit in the data sheet used a negative drive to the base.

The transistor could reliably switch on and off more than 100 times, whereas past devices would start degrading after just one or two cycles. What’s more, the new device is versatile.

Inside every smartphone, television and iPod, a computer chip holds circuits loaded with millions of transistors. By flipping on or off, the tiny switches direct electrical current to different ...