Photo diode

A photodiode is a type of photodetector capable of converting light into either current or voltage, depending upon the mode of operation.
Photodiodes are similar to regular semiconductor diodes except that they may be either exposed (to detect vacuum UV or X-rays) or packaged with a window or optical fiber connection to allow light to reach the sensitive part of the device. Many diodes designed for use specifically as a photodiode will also use a PIN junction rather than the typical PN junction.
Polarity:-
Some photodiodes will look like the picture to the right, that is, similar to a light emitting diode. They will have two leads, or wires, coming from the bottom. The shorter end of the two is the cathode, while the longer end is the anode. See below for a schematic drawing of the anode and cathode side. Under forward bias, conventional current will pass from the anode to the cathode, following the arrow in the symbol. Photocurrent flows in the opposite direction.
Principal of operation:-
A photodiode is a PN junction or PIN structure. When a photon of sufficient energy strikes the diode, it excites an electron, thereby creating a mobile electron and a positively charged electron hole. If the absorption occurs in the junction's depletion region, or one diffusion length away from it, these carriers are swept from the junction by the built-in field of the depletion region. Thus holes move toward the anode, and electrons toward the cathode, and a photocurrent is produced.

Zener diode

A Zener diode is a type of diode that permits current in the forward direction like a normal diode, but also in the reverse direction if the voltage is larger than the breakdown voltage known as "Zener knee voltage" or "Zener voltage". The device was named after Clarence Zener, who discovered this electrical property. A conventional solid-state diode will not allow significant current if it is reverse-biased below its reverse breakdown voltage. When the reverse bias breakdown voltage is exceeded, a conventional diode is subject to high current due to avalanche breakdown. Unless this current is limited by external circuitry, the diode will be permanently damaged. In case of large forward bias (current in the direction of the arrow), the diode exhibits a voltage drop due to its junction built-in voltage and internal resistance. The amount of the voltage drop depends on the semiconductor material and the doping concentrations.
A Zener diode exhibits almost the same properties, except the device is specially designed so as to have a greatly reduced breakdown voltage, the so-called Zener voltage. A Zener diode contains a heavily doped p-n junction allowing electrons to tunnel from the valence band of the p-type material to the conduction band of the n-type material. In the atomic scale, this tunneling corresponds to the transport of valence band electrons into the empty conduction band states; as a result of the reduced barrier between these bands and high electric fields that are induced due to the relatively high levels of dopings on both sides. A reverse-biased Zener diode will exhibit a controlled breakdown and allow the current to keep the voltage across the Zener diode at the Zener voltage. For example, a diode with a Zener breakdown voltage of 3.2 V will exhibit a voltage drop of 3.2 V if reverse bias voltage applied across it is more than its Zener voltage. However, the current is not unlimited, so the Zener diode is typically used to generate a reference voltage for an amplifier stage, or as a voltage stabilizer for low-current applications.
The breakdown voltage can be controlled quite accurately in the doping process. While tolerances within 0.05% are available, the most widely used tolerances are 5% and 10%.
Another mechanism that produces a similar effect is the avalanche effect as in the avalanche diode. The two types of diode are in fact constructed the same way and both effects are present in diodes of this type. In silicon diodes up to about 5.6 volts, the Zener effect is the predominant effect and shows a marked negative temperature coefficient. Above 5.6 volts, the avalanche effect becomes predominant and exhibits a positive temperature coefficient.
Uses:-

Zener diodes are widely used to regulate the voltage across a circuit. When connected in parallel with a variable voltage source so that it is reverse biased, a Zener diode conducts when the voltage reaches the diode's reverse breakdown voltage. From that point it keeps the voltage at that value.

Pentode

pentode is an electronic device having five active electrodes. The term most commonly applies to a three-grid vacuum tube, which was invented by the Dutchman Bernhard D.H. Tellegen in 1926.
Advantages over the tetrode:-

A tetrode could supply sufficient power to a speaker or transmitter, and offered a larger amplification factor than the earlier triode.
However, the positively charged screen grid can collect the secondary electrons emitted from the anode, which can cause increased current toward the screen grid, and cause the anode current to decrease with increasing anode voltage over part of the Ia/Va characteristic. Tellegen introduced an additional electrode, called the suppressor grid, which solved the problem of secondary emission. It does this by being held at a low potential, usually either grounded or connected to the cathode. The secondary emission still occurs, but the electrons can no longer reach the screen grid, since they have less energy than the primary electrons and hence cannot pass the grounded suppressor grid. Therefore these secondary electrons are re-collected by the anode.

Usage:-

Pentode valves were first used in consumer-type radio receivers. A well-known pentode type, the EF50, was designed before the start of the World War II, and was extensively used in radar sets and other military electronic equipment. The pentode contributed to the electronic preponderance of the Allies. After WW II, pentodes were widely used in TV receivers, particularly the successor to the EF50, the EF80. Vacuum tubes were replaced by transistors during the 1960s. However, they continue to be used in certain applications, including high-power radio transmitters and (because of their well-known valve sound) in high-end and professional audio applications, microphone preamplifiers and electric guitar amplifiers. Large stockpiles in countries of the former Soviet Union have provided a continuing supply of such devices, some designed for other purposes but adapted to audio use, such as the GU-50 transmitter tube.

Tetrode

A tetrode is an electronic device having four active electrodes. The term most commonly applies to a two-grid vacuum tube. It has the three electrodes of a triode and an additional screen grid which significantly changes its behaviour.
Control grid:-
The grid nearest the cathode is the "control grid"; the voltage applied to it causes the anode current to vary. In normal operation, with a resistive load, this varying current will result in varying (AC) voltage measured at the anode. With proper biasing, this voltage will be an amplified (but inverted) version of the AC voltage applied to the control grid, thus the tetrode can provide voltage gain.
Screen grid:-
The second grid, called "screen grid" or sometimes "shield grid", provides a screening effect, isolating the control grid from the anode. This helps to suppress unwanted oscillation, and to reduce an undesirable effect in triodes called the "Miller effect", where the gain of the tube causes a feedback effect which increases the apparent capacitance of the tube's grid, limiting the tube's high-frequency gain. In normal operation the screen grid is connected to a positive voltage, and bypassed to the cathode with a capacitor. This shields the grid from the anode, reducing Miller capacitance between those two electrodes to a very low level and improving the tube's gain at high frequencies. When the tetrode was introduced, a typical triode had an input capacitance of about 5 pF, but the screen grid reduced this capacitance to about 0.01 pF.
As the screen grid is positively charged, it collects electrons, which causes current to flow in the screen grid circuit. This uses power and heats the screen grid; if the screen heats up enough it can melt and destroy the tube. There are two sources of electrons collected by the screen grid—in addition to the electrons emitted by the cathode, the screen grid can also collect secondary electrons ejected from the anode by the impact of the energetic primary electrons. Secondary emission can increase enough to decrease the anode current, since a single primary electron can eject more than one secondary electron. The reduction in anode current is because the external anode current (through the connection pin) is due to the cathode-to-anode current minus the secondary emission current. This can give the tetrode valve a distinctive negative resistance characteristic, sometimes called "tetrode kink". This is usually undesirable, although it can be exploited as in the dynatron oscillator. The secondary emission can be suppressed by adding a suppressor grid, making a pentode, or beam plates to make a beam tetrode/kinkless tetrode.
The positive influence of the screen grid in the vicinity of the control grid allows a designer to shift the control grid operating voltage range entirely into the negative region (a triode of similar geometry would likely require positive grid drive to attain the same maximum anode current). When any grid is driven positive relative to the cathode it can intercept electrons from the cathode, loading the drive circuitry. If the input signal causes the control grid to become positive (where current flow begins), nonlinearity is to be expected. (The control grid draws no current while negative—high impedance—but draws current while positive—low impedance.) With the control grid operating entirely in the negative region, and with the RF shielding afforded by the screen grid, tetrode input impedance is quite high even at high frequencies. Gain can be nearly flat from DC to full frequency. Linearity is good. Power gain in excess of 10,000 is possible.
The triode vacuum tube also develops a "space charge" between the cathode and control grid, which reduces its gain, especially at low anode voltages. The screen grid of a tetrode neutralizes the space charge and increases the tube's gain.
Power tetrodes are commonly used in radio transmitting equipment, because the need for neutralization is less than with triodes (see Radio transmitter design and Valve amplifier for more details). Screen current does represent loss. Some tube designers attempt to minimize screen current by placing each wire in the screen mesh directly behind a corresponding wire in the control grid mesh. Propagating electrons emerge from the control grid as a projected image of openings in the grid. By placing the screen in the shadow of the control grid, interception of electrons by the screen is minimized in normal operation. Screen current is negligible in many designs. Shadow grids are used in a variety of forms for a number of applications.
More than one screen grid can be used. For example the pentagrid converter has two. A tetrode can be converted to act as a triode by connecting the screen grid to the anode.
Circuit design considerations Under certain operating conditions, the tetrode exhibits negative resistance due to secondary emission of electrons from the anode (to the screen). The shape of the characteristic curve of a tetrode operated in this region led to the term "tetrode kink". In general, if the anode voltage exceeds the screen voltage, this region is avoided, and good performance can be expected. But this lower limit on total tube voltage drop prevents widespread adoption of tetrodes for consumer amplification applications. Secondary emissions from a screen have the effect of pulling the screen upward, toward the anode voltage. This implies the need for both source and sink current capability in the ideal screen power supply. A bleeder resistor can usually be selected to prevent the screen voltage from getting out of control. Arcs from the anode generally hit the screen. As such, special care is required in design of the socket wiring, to provide a direct discharge path for arc current. The undesirable nature of the tetrode kink led tube designers to add a third grid, called the suppressor grid; the resulting vacuum tube is called a pentode. More modern tubes have anodes treated to minimise secondary emission.
The negative resistance operating region of the tetrode is exploited in the dynatron oscillator, although this was practical only with earlier tubes with high secondary emission.
Invention:-
The tetrode tube was developed by Dr. Walter H. Schottky of Siemens & Halske GMBH in Germany during World War I. Thousands of variations of the tetrode design, as well as its later development the pentode, have been manufactured since then, although vacuum tubes in low-power equipment have been almost totally superseded by solid-state semiconductor devices.

Triode

A triode is an electronic amplification device having three active electrodes. The term most commonly applies to a vacuum tube (or valve in British English) with three elements: the filament or cathode, the grid, and the plate or anode. The triode vacuum tube is the first electronic amplification device.
Invention:-

The original three-element device was patented in 1908 by Lee De Forest who developed it from his original two-element 1906 Audion. The Audion did provide amplification. However it was not until around 1912 that other researchers, while attempting to improve the service life of the audion, stumbled on the principle of the true vacuum tube. The name triode appeared later, when it became necessary to distinguish it from other generic kinds of vacuum tubes with more or less elements (eg diodes, tetrodes, pentodes etc.). The Audion tubes deliberately contained some gas at low pressure. The name triode is only applied to vacuum tubes which have been evacuated of as much gas as possible. There was a parallel invention of the triode in charge of Austrian Robert von Lieben.
Operation:-
The principle of its operation is that, as with a thermionic diode, the heated cathode(either directly or indirectly by means of a filament) causes a space charge of electrons that may be attracted to the positively charged plate (anode in UK parlance) and create a current. Applying a negative charge to the control grid will tend to repel some of the (also negatively charged) electrons back towards the cathode: the larger the charge on the grid, the smaller the current to the plate. If an AC signal is superimposed on the DC bias of the grid, an amplified version of the AC signal appears in the plate circuit.

Applications:-

Although triodes are now largely obsolete in consumer electronics, having been replaced by the transistor, triodes continue to be used in certain high-end and professional audio applications, as well as in microphone preamplifiers and electric guitar amplifiers. Some guitarists routinely drive their amplifiers to the point of saturation, in order to produce a desired distortion tone. Many people prefer the sound of triodes in such an application, since the distortion of a tube amplifier, which has a "soft" saturation characteristic, can be more pleasing to the ear than that of a typical solid-state amplifier, which is linear up to the limits of its supply voltage and then clips abruptly. However, this typically only applied to the power stage of a tube amplifier.

Diode

In electronics, a diode is a two-terminal device (thermionic diodes may also have one or two ancillary terminals for a heater).
Diodes have two active electrodes between which the signal of interest may flow, and most are used for their unidirectional electric current property.
The unidirectionality most diodes exhibit is sometimes generically called the rectifying property. The most common function of a diode is to allow an electric current in one direction (called the forward biased condition) and to block the current in the opposite direction (the reverse biased condition). Thus, the diode can be thought of as an electronic version of a check valve.
Real diodes do not display such a perfect on-off directionality but have a more complex non-linear electrical characteristic, which depends on the particular type of diode technology. Diodes also have many other functions in which they are not designed to operate in this on-off manner.
Early diodes included “cat’s whisker” crystals and vacuum tube devices (also called thermionic valves). Today most diodes are made of silicon, but other semiconductors such as germanium are sometimes used.

History:-
Although the crystal (solid state) diode was popularized before the thermionic diode, thermionic and solid state diodes were developed in parallel.
The basic principle of operation of thermionic diodes was discovered by Frederick Guthrie in 1873.[1] Guthrie discovered that a positively-charged electroscope could be discharged by bringing a grounded piece of white-hot metal close to it (but not actually touching it). The same did not apply to a negatively charged electroscope, indicating that the current flow was only possible in one direction.
The principle was independently rediscovered by Thomas Edison on February 13, 1880. At the time Edison was carrying out research into why the filaments of his carbon-filament light bulbs nearly always burned out at the positive-connected end. He had a special bulb made with a metal plate sealed into the glass envelope, and he was able to confirm that an invisible current could be drawn from the glowing filament through the vacuum to the metal plate, but only when the plate was connected to the positive supply.
Edison devised a circuit where his modified light bulb more or less replaced the resistor in a DC voltmeter and on this basis was awarded a patent for it in 1883 (U.S. Patent 307,031). There was no apparent practical use for such device at the time, and the patent application was most likely simply a precaution in case someone else did find a use for the so-called “Edison Effect”.
About 20 years later, John Ambrose Fleming (scientific adviser to the Marconi Company and former Edison employee) realized that the Edison effect could be used as a precision radio detector. Fleming patented the first true thermionic diode in Britain [2] on November 16, 1904 (followed by U.S. Patent 803,684 in November 1905).
The principle of operation of crystal diodes was discovered in 1874 by the German scientist, Karl Ferdinand Braun.[3] Braun patented the crystal rectifier in 1899.[4] Braun’s discovery was further developed by Jagdish Chandra Bose into a useful device for radio detection.
The first actual radio receiver using a crystal diode was built by Greenleaf Whittier Pickard. Pickard received a patent for a silicon crystal detector on November 20, 1906[5] (U.S. Patent 836,531).
Other experimenters tried a variety of minerals and other substances, although by far the most popular was the Lead Sulfide mineral Galena. Although other substances offered slightly better performance, galena had the advantage of being cheap and easy to obtain, and was used almost exclusvely in home-built “crystal sets”, until the advent of inexpensive fixed germanium diodes in the 1950s.
At the time of their invention, such devices were known as rectifiers. In 1919, William Henry Eccles coined the term diode from Greek roots; dia means “through”, and ode (from ὅδος) means “path”.

Thermionic and gaseous stste diodes:-
Thermionic diodes are thermionic-valve devices (also known as vacuum tubes, tubes, or valves), which are arrangements of electrodes surrounded by a vacuum within a glass envelope. Early examples were fairly similar in appearance to incandescent light bulbs.
In thermionic valve diodes, a current through the heater filament indirectly heats the cathode, another internal electrode treated with a mixture of barium and strontium oxides, which are oxides of alkaline earth metals; these substances are chosen because they have a small work function. (Some valves use direct heating, in which a tungsten filament acts as both heater and cathode.) The heat causes thermionic emission of electrons into the vacuum. In forward operation, a surrounding metal electrode called the anode is positively charged so that it electrostatically attracts the emitted electrons. However, electrons are not easily released from the unheated anode surface when the voltage polarity is reversed. Hence, any reverse flow is negligible.
For much of the 20th century, thermionic valve diodes were used in analog signal applications, and as rectifiers in many power supplies. Today, valve diodes are only used in niche applications such as rectifiers in electric guitar and high-end audio amplifiers as well as specialized high-voltage equipment.

Semiconductor diodes:-

Most diodes today are based on semiconductor p-n junctions. In a p-n diode, conventional current is from the p-type side (the anode) to the n-type side (the cathode), but not in the opposite direction. Another type of semiconductor diode, the Schottky diode, is formed from the contact between a metal and a semiconductor rather than by a p-n junction.

Induction furnace

An induction furnace is an electrical furnace in which the heat is applied by induction heating of a conductive medium (usually a metal) in a crucible placed in a water-cooled alternating current solenoid coil. The advantage of the induction furnace is a clean, energy-efficient and well-controllable melting process compared to most other means of metal melting. Most modern foundries use this type of furnace and now also more iron foundries are replacing cupolas with induction furnaces to melt cast iron, as the former emit lots of dust and other pollutants. Induction furnace capacities range from less than one kilogram to one hundred tonnes capacity, and are used to melt iron and steel, copper, aluminium, and precious metals. The one major drawback to induction furnace usage in a foundry is the lack of refining capacity; charge materials must be clean of oxidation products and of a known composition, and some alloying elements may be lost due to oxidation (and must be re-added to the melt).Operating frequencies range from utility frequency (50 or 60 Hz) to 400 kHz or higher, usually depending on the material being melted, the capacity(volume) of the furnace and the melting speed required. Generally the smaller the volume of the melts the higher the frequency of the furnace used; this is due to the skin depth which is a measure of the distance an alternating current can penetrate beneath the surface of a conductor. For the same conductivity the higher frequencies have a shallow skin depth - that is less penetration into the melt. Lower frequencies can generate stirring or turbulence in the metal.
A preheated 1-tonne furnace melting iron can melt cold charge to tapping readiness within an hour.
An operating induction furnace usually emits a hum or whine (due to magnetostriction), the pitch of which can be used by operators to identify whether the furnace is operating correctly, or at what power level.