Schmitt trigger
Disparador Schmitt
- Date
- 1934 · confidence medium
- Place
- Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri, United States
- Credited to
- Otto Schmitt
- Field
- Matter & energy
What it is
While studying nerve-impulse propagation in the squid giant axon, Schmitt designed a comparator circuit with hysteresis -two different rising and falling thresholds- that turns a noisy analogue signal into a clean digital output.
Schmitt devised it in 1934 as a graduate student and detailed it in his 1937 doctoral thesis; dated here to 1934 with medium confidence as the source does not give an exact month.
What it led to
- Debouncing of digital switches
- 7400 and 4000 series logic families with Schmitt inputs
- Relaxation oscillators and function generators