Schematic Reference

Negative Auxiliary Voltage

Some circuits need a negative supply voltage that only has to supply a small current. Providing a separate transformer winding for this (possibly even with a rectifier and filter capacitor) would be a rather extravagant solution. It can also be done using a few gates and several passive components. The combination of gate IC1a and the other three gates (wired in parallel) forms a square-wave generator. D1 and D2 convert the ac voltage into a dc voltage. As a CMOS IC is used here, the load on the negative output is limited to a few milli-amperes, depending on the positive supply voltage (see chart), despite the fact that three gates are connected in parallel.


However, as the figure shows, the negative voltage has almost the same magnitude as the positive input voltage, but with the opposite sign. If a clock signal in the range of 10–50 kHz is available, it can be connected to the input of IC1a, and R1 and C1 can then be omitted.