Sample & Hold

The original design of the S&H circuit suffers from some quirks. Tom Gamble made some modifications (see Wildcat rev 2 schemo) such as removing R4. As a matter of fact, this resistor introduces a lot of droop and the circuit cannot hold the voltage for a long time. Personally, I also bypassed R3, in order to get a faster voltage tracking during the sampling phase. Another point was bothering me : the original circuit behaves more like a Track & Hold circuit rather than a Sample and Hold circuit ! To have it behaving the way I expected, I made the following mods : remove R5 and insert a 15nF cap at the clock input. This capacitor acts as a differentiator with a short time constant : therefore the sampling time will remain rather short (around 10ms).
There is also an error in the pin label for the output of the module : the actual output pin is D and not C as it was stated in the original schematic (Rev1 and Rev2).


original schematic (copyright EFM)

modified schematic