In reply to Stephen A. Lawrence's message of Wed, 28 Feb 2007 23:49:54 -0500: Hi, [snip] >In any case there's also thermal noise in the diode, as I believe I also >pointed out (though I didn't phrase it that way), and that is surely >where you should be hunting for the flaw in the design. [snip] If you look at the voltage current curve of a diode for both positive and negative currents, then it is clearly asymmetric. That's why we use them. In short they convert AC into DC, and it doesn't matter whether the AC is a perfect sine wave or a random mess. Even the latter will result in at least some DC component. I agree with you that a diode should produce the same sort of thermal AC voltage as a resistor, however it should also rectify it's own voltage. IOW a diode connected across a capacitor should eventually charge the capacitor, if it's thermal voltage is current independent.
Regards, Robin van Spaandonk http://users.bigpond.net.au/rvanspaa/ Competition (capitalism) provides the motivation, Cooperation (communism) provides the means.
