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Avalanche breakdown (or the avalanche effect) is a phenomenon that can occur in both insulating and semiconducting materials. It is a form of electric current multiplication that can allow very large currents within materials which are otherwise good insulators. It is a type of electron avalanche.
The device operates by shunting excess current when the induced voltage exceeds the avalanche breakdown potential. It is a clamping device, suppressing all overvoltages above its breakdown voltage. It automatically resets when the overvoltage goes away, but absorbs much more of the transient energy internally than a similarly rated crowbar device.
For a device that makes use of the secondary breakdown effect see Avalanche transistor. Secondary breakdown is a failure mode in bipolar power transistors. In a power transistor with a large junction area, under certain conditions of current and voltage, the current concentrates in a small spot of the base-emitter junction.
In an avalanche photodiode the original charge carrier is created by the absorption of a photon. The impact ionization process is used in modern cosmic dust detectors like the Galileo Dust Detector [ 2 ] and dust analyzers Cassini CDA , [ 3 ] Stardust CIDA and the Surface Dust Analyser [ 4 ] for the identification of dust impacts and the ...
NXP 7030AL - N-channel TrenchMOS logic level FET IRF640 Power Mosfet die. The power MOSFET is the most widely used power semiconductor device in the world. [3] As of 2010, the power MOSFET accounts for 53% of the power transistor market, ahead of the insulated-gate bipolar transistor (27%), RF power amplifier (11%) and bipolar junction transistor (9%). [24]
The first paper dealing with avalanche transistors was Ebers & Miller (1955).The paper describes how to use alloy-junction transistors in the avalanche breakdown region in order to overcome speed and breakdown voltage limitations which affected the first models of such kind of transistor when used in earlier computer digital circuits.
In electronics, an avalanche diode is a diode (made from silicon or other semiconductor) that is designed to experience avalanche breakdown at a specified reverse bias voltage. The junction of an avalanche diode is designed to prevent current concentration and resulting hot spots, so that the diode is undamaged by the breakdown.
In most cases, this can be easily filtered out by placing a small capacitor in parallel with the VR tube or using an RC decoupling network downstream of the VR tube. Too large a capacitance (>0.1 μF for an 0D3, for instance), however, and the circuit will form a relaxation oscillator , definitely ruining the voltage regulation and possibly ...