To buy digital potentiometers in Ukraine

Potentiometers are three terminals, two fixed terminals and one terminal used to change the output voltage. It has many applications such as system calibration, voltage transient adjustment, filter adjustment, screen brightness adjustment, volume adjustment, and more. However, mechanical potentiometers suffer from some serious disadvantages that make them unsuitable for use in many applications.

The main disadvantages of a mechanical potentiometer are size, mechanical wear, resistance, vibration sensitivity, moisture, etc. The digital potentiometer does not have such disadvantages, so it is more common to use because it provides greater accuracy.

Design of digital potentiometers

At power up, depending on our requirements, we increase or decrease the resistance of the corresponding button operation. This memory can now be volatile or persistent depending on usage. For example, when adjusting the volume of a device, we expect the device to remember the last used volume setting even after we have restarted it. Thus, a suitable non-volatile memory is suitable for this. On the other hand, for systems that continually recalibrate the output and do not need to restore the previous value, volatile memory is used.

Advantages and disadvantages

We will now discuss the pros and cons of digital potentiometers

Benefits of digital potentiometers

• Greater reliability.
• Increased accuracy.
• Small size, multiple potentiometers can be packed into one chip.
• Minor resistance movement.
• Environmental conditions such as vibration, humidity, shock do not affect the operation.
• No moving part.
• Tolerance up to ± 1%.
• Very low power dissipation, up to tens of milliwatts.

Disadvantages

• Not suitable for high temperature environments and high power applications.
• It is necessary to take into account the bandwidth that is taken into account when displaying the digital potentiometer. This is the highest signal frequency that can go beyond the resistor terminals with less than 3 dB attenuation.
• The transmission equation is similar to the low pass filter equation.
• Resistance non-linearity introduces harmonic distortion in the output signal. Uniform harmonic distortion, or THD, quantifies the amount of attenuation of a signal after passing through a resistor.