Hi sorry about the new office background here. It didn't have time to build its scale or to paint it. In a previous video in previous couple of videos, we looked at the three cent microcontroller from Paddock and we got that from our LCSC which is a Chinese catalog type digi-key kind of competitive digi-key Mouser Funnels catalog competitor and I thought would take a look at another part from it's not a microcontroller because microcontrollers are expensive right at 3 cents. How about another jelly bean part which you'd be no doubt familiar with the low dropout voltage regulator.

How cheap can you get these on? LCSC Well, turns out you can get them for one cent or a little bit up, maybe 1/2 cents. I'm rounding down to one cent the one cent linear regulator I Bought three thousand of them. Let's check them out. So why on earth would you want a one cent voltage regulator? Well, why not? When you're optimizing the Bill of Materials for your product, it could matter.

And with modern products like FPGA is another like you know, really high density logic. They often require lots of low voltage power supplies, not just 3.3 volts, you know, 2.5 volts, 1.8 volts, 1.2 volts. you know, even like Point 8 Volt calls 1 volt cause and things like that. So it's not uncommon to need even like half a dozen different voltage rails inside your product.

And that really adds up when you're talking about you know, selling thousands of items and you might have you know, three or four even five voltage regulators per products. So I can often pay to have like a cheap jellybean part like this voltage regulator for example, this one's actually a fixed 3.3 volt one. but we might have a look at adjustable ones just to show you how cheap they are. And well, let's go to Digi-key for example and do a search here on I've sorted by price here in volume they start at like 3600.

they start at four and a half cents, which is pretty cheap, but you'll note that's obsolete from a company that I've never heard of Skyworks Salut Shen's Inc missin Nano Power Rains, you know. But if you go down here like the next one that's actually active which is the cheapest is basically six cents in volume. So like 3,000 volume and you add these up you have multiple products times. thousand is trying to reduce your bill of materials and stuff like that.

Well, why spend, you know, six cents plus tech? you know they're eight and a half cents. Stuff like that might not sound like a lot, but when trying to optimize your building materials, these sorts of stuff really add up. So if you go over to LCS see here which is kind of like the Chinese kind of competitor to Digi-key that Spent that specializes in having these Chinese brands have didn't done a previous video looking at these and if you search for positive linear regulators as well, they've got 898 parts here and here we go look the cheapest one. the LC 60, 202 from Shenzhen Foom n Electric Corp is like in the order of 1.6 but the one we're gonna look at here that I've actually got three thousand of why three thousand because they came on a real of three thousand and it was cheaper.

So I just got a real three thousand because they might come in handy anyway. the SC 6, 6, 2, K and this is the 3.3 volt versions. You can get other versions with our different fixed voltages and there's also and if you want to search for adjustable ones, you can search for adjustable often. It's sometimes better to say include like a jellybean adjustable voltage regulator so that you can just choose whatever.

So you've got the one Bill of Materials item there. But then you need your different resistors, three pick-and-place parts as opposed to just one and and stuff like that. So it's nice just to have because you're always going to need a 3.3 volt rail. so it's nice to have this anyway.

Look at the price in 20 of quantity there only 2.4 cents and when you start talking serious volume here, one and a half cents. and if you go up there, it's like one point Four four cents. and you've got to remember this is not direct from the manufacturer. This is from a Chinese digi-key equivalent catalog supplier who actually have stock.

In this case, they don't actually have much of this. but look these ones up here. Five thousand, Four thousand, Thirty thousand in stock, right? There's no shortage of these ones. So here's another one that I had a look at.

This one that come comes from NAT Linea You might think Oh National Linea That sounds legit. No. Matt Linea is Matt Linea Calm. its Reiner It's got nothing to do with National Semiconductor or Linear Technology, but they said hey, they're famous names or just join them together.

Hey will sound legit. There you go. So they sell. They have this three hundred milli amp linear regulator in different packages.

It's not that it's a little bit more expensive than the one we've got here, but anyway, all Chinese data sheets. So yep, knock yourself out. This one actually does have curves, but the one we're going to play with the Phen jian Phu man Electric Co if we have a look at the data sheet. Shinzon Fine.

Mad Fine Mad Electronics Group. This is hilarious. So that sounds ridiculous. The Shenzhen Fine Mad Electronics Group in fact I Think they've got their name wrong in their own name.

Wrong in the data sheet. Because if you go over here, it's the Shenzhen Fine Made Electronics Group. Maybe it's not the same company. Anyway, they're listed on the Chinese our stock exchange.

They're currently 20 Chinese bucks. There you go for the share price. Um, I Assume it's the same company. Anyway, maybe there is a Shenzhen Fine Mad, but I It's nuts.

but it sounds like they're right company. Shenzhen Fine Made engages in design development package and testing the sale of electronic and digital analog hybrid integrated circuits in China are used in power Management class. bingo and all sorts of so it sounds like them. Um, and they do Super Chip Dot CN Is that them? Let's check them out.

Yep, it's them. Super Chip Dot CN So fine, man. And yep, there it is there. She datasheet once again only available.

It's exactly the same one. So if M is fine, mad, and here's the actual part I've got here. It says 80 milliamps there, but that would be 18 millivolts. Drop out at 18 milliamps current and you'll notice that they actually come in a hermetically sealed package like this.

You don't generally don't want to take these out of their hermetically sealed packages like this until it gets to the pick-and-place machine. The reason that they do this and this one doesn't include it, but often include a little one of those dry desiccant bags in there to absorb the moisture. And the whole part about that is that it keeps moisture from leaking into the parts before reflow part, plastic mold and packages like this in general is that if moisture can seep into the packages just sitting there on the shelf and once that moisture seeps in, then it can. When it goes through the reflow oven that heats up the air can expand in your gas, it can actually crack the plastic package of these things.

So yeah, just something to watch out for a bit. There's no desiccant bag in this one. Oh yes there is there it is. Desiccant bag didn't see it so you don't have to read Chinese to be able to understand this datasheet.

It's clearly plus minus 2% nominal tolerance there. Six volts maximum input voltage very typical for these kind of low voltage low dropout regulators are a selectable output voltage from 1.5 volts to 5 volts. In fact, resettable point 1 volt increments LCSC of course aren't going to carry all of like the point one-inch voltage things, but hey, maybe you can. You know if you're serious about this and you can maybe order them direct from the manufacturer, maybe you can talk to LC SC and they might be able to source them for you would just be the part number difference at the end.

25 micro amps quiescent current here looks like @ VN at four point three volts v out at Three Point Three, it's capable of 250 milliamps which is quite a generous amount of current for a little sot. 23 Jellybean regulator like this. Once again, you can get higher, you can get lower, but it's not too shabby nor point Two volts drop out at 90 milli amps output current nor point and that increases to 0.4 At 150 they don't tell you what the dropout is at two 50 and they don't provide any graphs further on the data sheets, so you just don't know. But hey, the whole idea is even if this data sheet, which doesn't have any performance, graphs or anything like that, you know just your basic data.

There's no reason why you should avoid these types of chips if you qualify them, which is, you know, not an incredibly difficult process. If you're serious about saving your bomb cost, you can qualify them: overload, temperature, very batch, variability, and all sorts of stuff. You can qualify these parts for your own in-house purposes and go. Yep, we're going to use those where confidence got X dropout and X performance under X load and all that sort of jazz.

Anyway, our typical line regulation there of 0.03 percent per volt seen at 23 package. It's a one and a half cent jellybean regulator power supply rejection ratio there 50 DB and it looks like it's got a current limit as well. If you short the output are limited to 30 milliamps of go up here. There it is.

they got a current limit there in the circuitry. There's not a lot of data on this thing, but who cares I aren't fight. Why is it a 500 milliamps down there? That's absolute absolute maximum. I limit down here is 400.

Yeah, you know you get what you get with these data sheets. But anyway, let's try out the fine Mad Ortiz regulator for 1.5 cents. Alright, let's power this thing up. take a look.

I've got it down on a little adapter down there little SOT 23 job' Yes, I will no I don't have any bypass codes because I thought we just have a look first to see the stability is thing without any bypass capacitors on it because this is a low dropout voltage regulator in an L do. One of the classic issues with Audios is stability. They can actually oscillate if you don't incorrect if you don't correctly load them with the correct amount of capacitance, the correct type of capacitor, the ESR all that sort of stuff. so they can potentially oscillate because they use a PNP or a p-channel pass element which is inherently more unstable.

And anyway, I Won't go into the details, but the advantage of it is is that you get the low dropout voltage for a 3.3 volt output voltage. You can only need to feed in say three point, four volts or something like that. You know if it's 100 milliamps dropout and of course that will change with current. So let's actually I'm actually doing that at the moment, actually had it loaded there.

We've actually got no load at the moment. so no load with no capacitance. Absolutely no import or output capacitance. We're pairing it from 5 volts here.

our output here I am actually sensing if you're wondering what this line is. this is. actually the voltage sense line which goes around to the back and you can't see it. but there's actually a external voltage sent in here.

so we're going to avoid any drops on the line actually going over when we load this thing down. And as you can see, 3.28 8 volts there. No problems whatsoever. and you can see over on the scope here.

I'm like there's no oscillation at all. Well, nothing serious. We'll take a look at AC at the minute and in a minute, that's just DC there. Let's just change our input voltage here and see what happens.

I Know I've got absolutely no left. Four Point Three A three point four sorry input voltage and it's still output in there. We go. it should.

Three Point three. Oops. Yeah, heads drop in there. But anyway, that's all hunky-dory So let's actually let lets say four volts input.

Let's actually turn on a hundred milli amp load. So there we go. Got a hundred milliamp load. You can see 100 milliamps on here, no problems, and which are in the hundred milliamps from the input.

Because of course, there's almost virtually no quiescent current in this thing. That's the order of. you know, what? was it? Thirty microwaves or something, tens of micro amps. So it's the input current.

It's gonna equal the output current and that's fine and dandy. Let's so let's actually input. so let's increase our load current, shall we? Let's go up and nothing on our scope. It's looking good in it.

What was this? It was 300. It was 250. wasn't a thing I said 400. Oh yeah, yeah, we're starting to get some starting to get some funny business happening over here.

Whoa for hunt. Well, anyway, 1.3 watts output power and but it's still. it's still regulated. so that's AC coupling at 5 millivolts per division with that load there.

Let's just switch the load off and on. And of course we can capture that so it's gonna work. but that's basically going up to like 1.3 watts. That's that's pretty abusive and the thing is regulating that.

it's handling that. No problems at all. All right. So let's see if we can capture a transient there as we switch it off and on.

So I'll set my trigger level just below that, so we'll single-shot capture that. So let's switch that on. And yep, it really does not like that at all. So that's terrible.

Muriel Yep, look at that. There you go. So we can see that it's just dropped. It's just dropped out completely there for a second.

But it's kind of to be expected because our load is horrible. It's 390 milliamps. Okay, let's try that again. But a hundred milliamps this time? Bingo.

There we go. we got, so don't worry about the one before. I Look at that. Isn't that a thing of beauty when we switch it on? Nope.

Guess we've got no output capacitance at all, but that's like It's pretty impressive for 100 milliamp load with no input or output capacitance. Fantastic. We can. let's whack on an output cap seven.

Get that to go away? All right? So I've got a 0.47 Mike our film cap across the output and ground. There's still no input capacitance. I've saved this as a reference waveform, so that'll allow us to see the difference. Let's switch that off a 900 milliamp load again.

Bingo that it's smaller, but it's still there. Look at that. But the response is basically still the same, but that extra output capacitance has helped. Let's go a bit larger.

I've got a fair bit larger 330 micro Farad's on the extended leads. Please forgive me? Yeah, good enough for Australia Let's go. and it's not even triggering now because it's just hunky-dory Can we move the trigger point even closer to there? I Suspect we may not even? Yep. Doesn't even get a blip.

and that's what you expect because now our capacitance is more than enough capable to take that little switch on transient there. So yeah, anyway, it's still stable with our 330 Mike electro. No problems, even with a 300 milli amp load. Can't get that.

can't fold it. No problems anyway. just wanted to show you this is 10 millivolts per division. The there's no oscillation there.

That's with it. Smacks it up. Oh there you go, it's that's coupling through our probe. so piezoelectric effect for you anyway.

I'm full load, 250 milliamps there and we turn that off. Yeah, we can see at no load you can see a little bit of funny business going on there. and if we turn that on, tweak our load there. you can see it down.

at no load. There's some like lower frequency oscillation stuff there by the looks of it. So anyway, that's that's not bad. That's with no output capacitance.

That's crazy. It was half a mic output capacitors to change it in one milliamp increments to three. Yeah, you can see it slowly start to change there, but basically that's we combine the wick up way on that and know this is a pretty stable part. I'm quite impressed.

Okay, something pretty horrible. Now, no output capacitance with 330 micro Farad's right at the end of these long leads. I'll work that in the back. There we go.

Like there. That is fine. That's it. Like almost 250 milliamps there.

Of course we get our big gas spike on our and if of course we get our turn-on spike there, we'll see that. If we look there we go. Yeah, no problems whatsoever. So yeah, this thing is stable with no well, you wouldn't use it with no capacitive load and the datasheet unless you can read Chinese I guess So it doesn't tell your nominal output capacitance or output capacitance type or an ESR range or anything like that.

But of course you'd put your nominal one say yeah, you know. Typically, one microfarad, a ceramic across the output is usually fine for an audio like this. Okay, let's be mean and look at what happens if we short our output so we're gonna have a look at what sort of current it's gonna take up here. It's supposed to have a current limit.

Yeah, there we go, stroking down. what's it supposed to have? Like 30 milliamps or something. But anyway, it's dropping down to 120 milliamps. So oscillated to buggery over here.

Wow What's going on there? Wow Check out that Ayran. 20 milli volt, 50 milli watts per division that is like I will gotta short like directly across there like that. Of course you know there's something like there's some resistance in there. so obviously something's happening that's 50 millivolts per division.

You know the extra connections and stuff like that. so it's not a direct short on the pins and you can see. So there you go, about 70 Hertz There it's entered some sort of art. you know, current regulation, you know, pulse mode and if you remove it of course will shoot back at.

Well, let's try and get the recovery on, that shall we? So I'm going to pull the plug on that and what? Ah no, if we killed it, what's going on? Something's whamp whamp whamp whamp oint 1. Don't silly me. Yeah I had the had the load on there so it looks like it wouldn't recover from short - to the 250 milliamp load. but as soon as I turn the load off, of course it recovered back like that.

So that's interesting I wonder if I'll try that again, but like it. a lot of currency. 50 milliamps or something and so 50 milliamp load this time. So going from short back to a 50 milliamp constant current load? of course it's not a it's not a resistor, it's an active all look at that isn't that neat? Wow, that's a something.

sort of started to recover there. or well, of course you know there's it. Could be contact bouncing there. of course.

So something happened and we're at 5 milliseconds per division. Say yeah, that can easily be like contact stuff, but yeah, it ramps back up. It recovers very nicely. I'm quite happy with that.

No workers like. The end is no isolation and that's once again with no output capacitor. I know I think I still got my 330 Mike my 330 micro farad's plugged into the other end I Mean that's as horrible as it gets Wow Ok, we'll try that again, but with no output capacitance this time. So I got none at the end of the line.

none on the board here. So oh, there we go. Oh that's that's what happens when you shorted out. By the way, there you go and 50 milli amp constant current load.

So there's going to be like a response for the electronic load because it's an electronic software function which does it. so it's not as good as like say having a resistor load and stuff like that. So if you're testing like proper pulse response of a regulator or a power supply, you know you need to do it with a proper resistive load. But here we go.

Yeah, there we go. Look at that. We got a similar. is that the same? Yeah, cuz we're at fun.

I Finally seconds per division and there's a little bit of over shoe there. this time, a little bit, not much. Oh yeah, oh there's something. and then a little dip.

but once again, as I said, there's no capacitance on there. But yeah, it's got this little shelf in there so obviously that's I reckon it'll do the same. It'll repeat that I reckon that'll be repeatable. So I reckon there's no, that's not contact bounce.

Yep, there you go. So there's something in there that gives this like little shelf in there from from recovery from short recovery back up. but still, that's pretty good these things. it's always bulletproof one more time, but I've got that.

There we go. that's with the half a mic capacitance on there so no worries. And then we see that little dip. but it recovers quite nicely from that short I've caught.

You know this is obviously not something you hugely want to care about in. well, you might in normal operation, but of course, with the building current limit, what you're really concerned with is that you don't don't blow the ice out of your regulator. You don't release the magic smoke when you know if the load on it shorts and you want it to recover. And this is pretty good.

Okay, so let's look at the dropout voltage at its maximum rated current: 250 milliamps. It's not absolute max, but that's its maximum recommended. And of course we get in. our it's pretty.

It's pretty darn accurate. This even I was like plus minus two percent. Of course you'd have to test. you know, a dozen units.

or a fifty. or a hundred units or something you know to get an idea of our normal accuracy, especially across different production reels as well. You know, if they all come from the same die away fight, then you know they're all going to be. they should all be.

You know, reasonably similar. Anyway, it's bang ons all right. So let's drop our voltage down. So this is our input voltage here.

I'm gonna drop that down and we're looking at the AC output here. So 10 millivolts? pretty earlier there we go. Yep, so dropout. Oh yeah.

3.0 Yep, there we go. Let's call that at what 300 And yeah, let's call it 300 millivolts, 300 millivolts dropout. And if I drop out, it means it drops out of regulation And you can see that like it's still right. Like it's still the voltage is still there.

But it's You can see that it's becoming a bit unstable. Will that change if we remove our capacitance? No look at that. Wow No capacitor in. put output capacitance at all.

That's crazy. Let's put 330 mic on that. Not still in the same business. The responses all the same.

So this the response of this thing with a capacitive load? It's like it really almost doesn't matter once again. I Wouldn't recommend using it without output capacitors. That's just silly. Um, but yeah, it's It's really stable.

So quite impressed. I'm sure. So 300 millivolts drop out at full rated current. Let's go down 200 milliamps and let's keep going down.

Damn there we go. So 200 milliamps? Let's say the dropout. I Mean talking about 150 milliamp? Drop out there. If we go down to say 10 milliamps, you know, not much at all, then a dropout voltage should be quite low.

Yeah, there we go. Yeah, three point straight like it's it's nephal like it's tens of millions drop out. So yeah, this thing's pretty decent I like it for those curious to know about ripple rejection. I my feet in it from my function Gen which is generating 5 volts with 500 milli volts, peak-to-peak sine wave on there at 1 kilohertz and my output there on the second channel of the green one.

There you go, rock-solid and if we a see couple that there's nothing there. So it is, it's just fine. 2 Kilohertz 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 come on, come on and we've got no output capacitors to you. By the way, 30 kilohertz Now of course that was only a load load there because I'm Parenthood from a AAA function.

Gen here I Couldn't be bothered like getting a higher power solution for this. This is a 40 milli Hertz million Hertz 40 milliamps and get your units right Dave and the 40 million Bart load and that's we're back to our one kilohertz and it's it's just fine. One and a half cents for this regulator and a lot of people would say I wouldn't trust this thing any further than I can read the datasheet. Oh well, you know, look fair enough.

But yeah, if you're in the business where cents matters on parts and you know you've got a lot of these on your board and you're manufacturing a lot of boards and all that sort of stuff and this seems like a good little bulletproof regulator, it's its accuracy. Cents fine. Its load regulation seems fine. It's a dropout.

performance is, you know, more than good enough. It's stability. With our capacitive loads or lack thereof and you know, distributed at the end of long lines, it seems fine as well. Seems absolutely bulletproof.

From a stability our point of view, it's recovery from our shorts is fine. Everything's hunky-dory in this thing. It it's almost like a bulletproof little you know, jelly bean 1.5 cent suck 23 voltage regulator so it's like it's well worthy of consideration. of course.

like I haven't tested noise performance in. there's a whole bunch of other parameters which you can test. You could spend weeks qualifying apart like this, you know I haven't tested it over temperature and all sorts of stuff so it might be worth are considering these like you know, generic Asian brand parts for your next project if you're looking to save the cost cuz haven't been able to fault this thing yet. So pretty impressed by that.

1.5 cents. it's worth every micro cent this part. So anyway, if you like that video, please give it a big thumbs up. And as always you can discuss a down below.

Let us know if you've used any of these. you know, non non mainstream in quote marks I mean these parts are probably bog-standard in China used in every you know $2 fart in novelty gadget that you can get and they probably just abyssal. the perfect little regulator's um, it's just that they're just not one of you you know Western brand knowing suppliers like your you know, your T eyes or your Nationals or whoever and this thing it seems to work a treat. It's one like it's one fifth the cost of any at least one fifth the cost.

It's just crazy And that's from a catalog supplier. imagine week if you did a deal. If you needed hundreds of thousands or millions of these things and your boredom from directly from the manufacturer, zooming that you can do that of course I'm sure you could. And how much what these things cost when you like to really will and deal the price let alone just remote off the shelf? often like stock off-the-shelf catalog supplier like LCSC hits nuts.

Catch you next time.