[sdiy] Intersil ICL8038?

[Aaron Lanterman]

On Jul 4, 2007, at 4:46 PM, JAMES GALLANT wrote:

> Has anybody used an Intersil ICL8038 Waveform Genorator/VCO chip in  
> a DYI circuit?  If so, pros and cons?

It's well known that just running them as on the data sheet doesn't  
do so well. One thing to know about the chips is they do seem to run  
pretty hot, if you run them as on the datasheet.

I had a student build various VCOs of linear and exponential sort.  
There's some interesting ones in electronotes.

Just as an experiment he tried driving a linear 8038 VCO with a  
voltage-to-voltage expo converter. This, as you might expect, was  
pretty mediocre.

I wouldn't bother seeking them out; I was only personally interested  
since there happen to be a bunch of them in an obscure drawer in an  
obscure corner of the undergrad EE labs. But if you have some on hand  
already they're worth playing with.

- Aaron