One of the joys of writing up the entries for the 2025 Component Abuse Challenge has come in finding all the different alternative uses for the humble transistor. This building block of all modern ...

Most electronic engineers know that a transistor’s base-emitter voltage (V BE) has a temperature coefficient (TC) of about -2 mV/°C. However, for precision temperature sensors, “about” isn’t good ...

It is no secret that semiconductor junctions change their behavior with temperature, and you can use this fact to make a temperature sensor. The problem is that you have to calibrate each device for ...

Temperature is one of the most common environmental metrics that is measured in electronic systems, and numerous sensor types are available to meet the various application requirements of embedded ...

To make a remote temperature sensor with the LTC2970, run two different currents (ILOW and IHIGH) through the transistor and measure VBE at both currents (VBE_LOW and VBE_HIGH). The difference between ...

Two papers at the International Solid-state Circuits Conference tackled ultra-low power on-chip temperature sensing, one using an npn transistor and the other by sensing a wire. The npn sensor ...