Fontana bridge
Encyclopedia
A Fontana bridge is a type of bridge circuit
Bridge circuit
A bridge circuit is a type of electrical circuit in which two circuit branches are "bridged" by a third branch connected between the first two branches at some intermediate point along them. The bridge was originally developed for laboratory measurement purposes and one of the intermediate...

 that implements a wide frequency band voltage-to-current converter. The converter is characterized by a combination of positive and negative feedback loops, implicit in this bridge configuration. This feature allows compensation for parasitic impedance connected in parallel with the useful load , which in turn keeps an excitation current flowing through the useful load independent of the instantaneous value of . This feature is of great advantage for making electromechanical transducers.
If balance condition:



is met, then:



The circuit includes two differential amplifiers. The top differential amplifier, whose output is referred to ground potential, has unitary gain. The bottom differential amplifier, whose output is referred to ground potential, has ideally infinite gain. Ordinary operational amplifiers can be adopted with limitations in accuracy and bandwidth.
The Fontana bridge is also called Compensated Current Injection Circuit.
It was originally discovered by Giorgio Fontana, University of Trento, Italy, in 2003 using a symbolic equation solver for kirchhoff's circuit laws
Kirchhoff's circuit laws
Kirchhoff's circuit laws are two equalities that deal with the conservation of charge and energy in electrical circuits, and were first described in 1845 by Gustav Kirchhoff...

. The bridge details are available in .
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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