TABLE OF CONTENTS This chapter furnishes the reader with fundamental information about passive networks and how they respond to transient events.
The world is composed of stray capacitance and inductance that will always limit how much bandwidth a circuit is capable of producing. In this chapter, I discuss RLC (resistance/inductance/capacitance) low-pass filters, their transient and frequency response, and how to increase bandwidth through various peaking techniques, including a technique known as "T-coil" peaking. I will discuss the theory of cascaded filters, bandwidth shrinkage factor, and optimum gain-per-stage to produce the maximum system-gain-bandwidth product.
In this chapter, you will learn about various kinds of low-pass filters, such as Butterworth filters and maximally flat envelope delay (MFED) filters. You will see the small-signal bandwidth these filters exhibit as well as how they respond to step response. You will learn that all high-frequency circuits are eventually limited in their bandwidth because of output resistance driving an input capacitance. And then you will observe that it is possible to increase bandwidth by the judicious use of inductance added in the right place. You will find that it is possible to obtain as much as 2.72 times the bandwidth of a simple RC (resistance/capacitance) low-pass filter while maintaining good transient response. These techniques are referred to as "peaking" networks.
Finally, you will see a number of engineering practices derived and summarized that have produced a series of quite useful approximations in circuit design.
The material presented in this chapter has been understood and used for a...
