A novel monostable circuit for micropower applications

Abstract

A new type of monostable circuit, based on the novel interconnection of a complementary transistor bistable circuit and a long-tail-pair comparator, is described. The power consumption in the stable state of the circuit is only a few nanowatts, thus making the scheme particularly suitable for aerospace, telemetry, biomedical and mobile radar applications. The circuit gives accurately predictable output pulses with pulse widths as low as 0.2 mu s, which are relatively immune to supply voltage variations. The maximum mark-space ratio is approximately 1:5. With suitably chosen transistors the circuit can operate over a rail supply voltage range from 3 to 30 V, and is simply triggered from standard digital integrated circuit logic.