What exactly are clipper and clamper circuits? How are they used in real world applications?
Answer:
Clipper circuits remove the extreme peaks of electrical waveforms that go through them, chopping the overall signal down to size so the excessive amplitude does not overload the circuitry in subsequent stages and cause a malfunction. In other words, they operate as a crude AC voltage limiter or regulator to limit the peak voltage of the waveform. A clipper circuit may be used to chop off the crests and troughs of a sine wave to make it into a quasi-square wave more suitable for a timing application.
Clamper circuits are used to restore a DC bias to an AC waveform, usually a repetitive one. In the output of a clamp circuit, the waveform is biased so that the extreme high or low end of the waveform, depending on the polarity of the clamp diode, is near zero volts. The clamp diode remains nonconducting for most of the waveform, conducting only during that small part necessary to pump charge into the series capacitor to maintain the capacitor's DC bias at a level to keep the waveform at the correct level. This occurs during that part of the waveform in which the diode is forward biased. The capacitor resists any change in voltage across it and will maintain this voltage during the rest of the waveform.
Clamping circuits are sometimes used in the bias circuits of oscillators or in automatic gain control (AGC) circuits. The "grid leak" bias of old vacuum tube oscillators worked on this principle, with the cathode and grid serving as the cathode and anode of the clamping diode. A bleeder resistor was inserted between cathode and base to prevent the capacitor in series with the grid, which also functioned to block DC from the rest of the circuit while still passing the AC signal, from biasing the grid beyond cutoff and keeping it there despite the absence of a signal. A similar circuit will work to bias a junction field effect transistor (JFET).
The answers post by the user, for information only, FunQA.com does not guarantee the right.
More Questions and Answers: