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A Zener diode is a type of diode designed to exploit the Zener effect to affect electric current to flow against the normal direction from anode to cathode, when the voltage across its terminals exceeds a certain characteristic threshold, the Zener voltage. Zener diodes are manufactured with a variety of Zener voltages, including variable devices.
In electronics, the Zener effect (employed most notably in the appropriately named Zener diode) is a type of electrical breakdown, discovered by Clarence Melvin Zener. It occurs in a reverse biased p-n diode when the electric field enables tunneling of electrons from the valence to the conduction band of a semiconductor , leading to numerous ...
The Shockley diode equation relates the diode current of a p-n junction diode to the diode voltage .This relationship is the diode I-V characteristic: = (), where is the saturation current or scale current of the diode (the magnitude of the current that flows for negative in excess of a few , typically 10 −12 A).
In the Zener diode, the concept of PIV is not applicable. A Zener diode contains a heavily doped p–n junction allowing electrons to tunnel from the valence band of the p-type material to the conduction band of the n-type material, such that the reverse voltage is "clamped" to a known value (called the Zener voltage), and avalanche does not ...
The example at right shows how a load line is used to determine the current and voltage in a simple diode circuit. The diode, a nonlinear device, is in series with a linear circuit consisting of a resistor, R and a voltage source, V DD.
For simplicity, diodes may sometimes be assumed to have no voltage drop or resistance when forward-biased and infinite resistance when reverse-biased. But real diodes are better approximated by the Shockley diode equation, which has an more complicated exponential current–voltage relationship called the diode law.
Diagram of a simple circuit with an inductance L and a flyback diode D.The resistor R represents the resistance of the inductor's windings. A flyback diode is any diode connected across an inductor used to eliminate flyback, which is the sudden voltage spike seen across an inductive load when its supply current is suddenly reduced or interrupted.
Zener diode based noise source. A noise generator is a circuit that produces electrical noise (i.e., a random signal). Noise generators are used to test signals for measuring noise figure, frequency response, and other parameters. Noise generators are also used for generating random numbers. [1]