Multivibrator

A multivibrator is an electronic circuit used to implement a variety of simple two-state devices such as relaxation oscillators, timers and flip-flops. It consists of two amplifying devices (transistors, vacuum tubes or other devices) cross-coupled by resistors or capacitors. The first multivibrator circuit, the astable multivibrator oscillator, was invented by Henri Abraham and Eugene Bloch during World War I. They called their circuit a "multivibrator" because its output waveform was rich in harmonics.

The three types of multivibrator circuits are:

Multivibrators find applications in a variety of systems where square waves or timed intervals are required. For example, before the advent of low-cost integrated circuits, chains of multivibrators found use as frequency dividers. A free-running multivibrator with a frequency of one-half to one-tenth of the reference frequency would accurately lock to the reference frequency. This technique was used in early electronic organs, to keep notes of different octaves accurately in tune. Other applications included early television systems, where the various line and frame frequencies were kept synchronized by pulses included in the video signal.

The first multivibrator circuit, the classic astable multivibrator oscillator (also called a plate-coupled multivibrator) was first described by Henri Abraham and Eugene Bloch in Publication 27 of the French Ministère de la Guerre, and in Annales de Physique 12, 252 (1919). Since it produced a square wave, in contrast to the sine wave generated by most other oscillator circuits of the time, its output contained many harmonics above the fundamental frequency, which could be used for calibrating high frequency radio circuits. For this reason Abraham and Bloch called it a multivibrateur. It is a predecessor of the Eccles-Jordan trigger which was derived from the circuit a year later.

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