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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 ...
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 ...
Since the forward voltage of a diode is small, this kind of voltage regulator is only suitable for low voltage regulated output. When higher voltage output is needed, a zener diode or series of zener diodes may be employed. Zener diode regulators make use of the zener diode's fixed reverse voltage, which can be quite large.
The most stable diodes of this type are made by temperature-compensating a Zener diode by placing it in series with a forward diode; such diodes are made as two-terminal devices, e.g. the 1N821 series having an overall voltage drop of 6.2 V at 7.5 mA, but are also sometimes included in integrated circuits.
The term solid-state became popular at the beginning of the semiconductor era in the 1960s to distinguish this new technology. A semiconductor device works by controlling an electric current consisting of electrons or holes moving within a solid crystalline piece of semiconducting material such as silicon, while the thermionic vacuum tubes it replaced worked by controlling a current of ...
Schematic of an inverter using a vibrator as a chopper.. In electronics, a chopper circuit is any of numerous types of electronic switching devices and circuits used in power control and signal applications.
A working mechanism of a resonant tunneling diode device and negative differential resistance in output characteristic. There is a negative resistance characteristic after the first current peak, due to a reduction of the first energy level below the source Fermi level with gate bias.