Back in 1996, Bob Pease posed an experiment in an April Fools column. “Take an ordinary NPN transistor, ground the base, pull the emitter up to 12 V with a 1 KΩ resistor and measure the collector ...

I was digging around in the LM311 (and LM111, LM211) comparator data sheet, and came across this unusual voltage reference (diag right). It consists of an npn cascsode pair of transistors, the top one ...