The Filter Wizard and the Captain’s Log
A while back (The Filter Wizard: on being analog AND open) I took aim at the engineering practice of doing things the way they’ve always been done, rather than opening up to new solution approaches. This should not be taken to mean that we should summarily jettison older techniques in our enthusiasm to take advantage of newer devices or technologies. One such old technique helped me solve a challenge that would otherwise have cost the prospective customer much more money.
I was asked to look at how one of our products could implement an exposure measurement subsystem that could be incorporated into a hand-held exposure meter and even embedded in the light control loop of a photographic flash gun. The spec was tight: Measure exposure over a 16 EV range, to an accuracy of 0.1 EV. For the non-photographers out there, exposure value is a logarithmic scale for the light intensity in a scene, and an increment of 1 EV means a doubling of the light intensity.
The light is captured by a photodiode, and I just needed to worry about converting the wide range of anticipated photocurrents. 16 EVs is a 65536:1 range of current, and a 0.1 EV change amounts to 20.1 or around 1.07x. This means that the ratio of the smallest error to the largest current is just under 1 million (it’s 65536/0.07). So, if we were to take the naïve approach and just digitize the photocurrent, we’d need a 20-bit converter. "No problem!" said a colleague, "We have a fabulous 20-bit A-to-D converter right on our chip!" And indeed we do.
There’s just one itty-bitty problem, and the clue is in the phrase "flash gun." The xenon tubes that are still the most popular light source in such guns light up quite fast – really, we need to be able to grab hold of the light level every microsecond or two, so we can get a good picture of the total light energy emitted. And our fabulous 20-bit converter needs about 5 milliseconds to give us its result. For very short exposure durations, or for regulating the output of the flash over longer ones, it’s no use.
"No problem!" said another colleague, "We have a fabulous 1 megasample per second A-to-D converter right on our chip!" And, again, indeed we do. But this one’s only a 12-bit converter. And that’s way, way too limited a resolution to capture such a wide-ranging signal level.
Now, out there in the world of specialist analog chips, you can get 20 bits of ADC resolution at 1 Msps. The trouble is, it costs around $30, which was three EVs above my total solution budget (work it out!) right off the bat.
"You’ll think of something," was the best my colleagues could offer at this point, so I set out to do exactly that. And the past stepped up to help me, in the form of logarithmic compression – the log amp, in other words. This is an old-school circuit, described in the classic Burr-Brown textbooks.
Now, the log amp is still alive and well in specialist analog circles. The devices designed by my friend and hero, Barrie Gilbert, count among the highest dynamic range circuits it’s possible to buy, and are easily fast enough over the current range I needed to cover. But, again, are too expensive for this low-cost application. There was only one thing for it: The Filter Wizard: Just add a transistor!
This is a blog, so here’s the bit where I skip to the end. Figure 1 shows the simulation schematic used for exploring the logarithmic relationship of a BJT’s base-emitter voltage against collector current. You’ll notice that diodes have crept in – these are necessary to prevent the transistor from going into saturation if the input current drops off abruptly, leaving the previous base current nowhere to go.
Figure 1: Simulation framework for probing the core current-voltage relationship.
Figure 2 shows a close-up of the worst-case switching behavior, with the input current suddenly falling from 8.192 mA to one-half, one quarter, and so on, right down to 125 nA. For each halving of the current, the amplifier’s output voltage becomes less negative by around 18 mV, as anticipated.
Figure 2: Each halving of input current causes Figure 1’s output voltage to rise by 18mV.
Figure 3 shows how we can actually make some use of this block. We build it twice; one instance carries the photodiode current, and the other carries a reference current. The four Schottky diodes can be had in a single SOT-563 package from Central Semiconductor, and the dual transistor we used was the minuscule ONsemi NST3904. The difference in the voltages at the two emitters, which we can measure nicely with our fast 12-bit converter, is the "thermal voltage" – kT/q times the (natural) log of the current ratio.
Figure 3: Measure the difference between the two emitter voltages.
We need to take temperature into account, as always when you’re playing around with a PN junction. It’s easy to dynamically reroute things to use the second instance as a temperature sensor to correct the temperature dependence. Combined with some scaling, a bit of linearity correction, and some bit manipulation to do fast exponentiation in the digital domain, and the proof-of-concept was done! And all we had to do was just add a transistor. OK, two, and some diodes. Still, neat, eh?
Kendall Castor-Perry, systems architect and member of the technical staff at Cypress Semiconductor, is an experienced analog circuit designer and much-published communicator of theory and method in many electronics disciplines.
This article first appeared on EE Times’ Planet Analog website.
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